Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)
Got me excited for a second. $50? ******* that.
The full version is $300... the few features they chopped off aren't really that dire. $50 is a steal. Dragon software is leaps and bounds ahead of Siri. Siri is just a very glossy voice search with limited dictation. This isn't a product that's trying to be Siri... it's what Siri is built on.
Right, but what about Siri three years from now after the processor has quadrupled in speed and Siri's database of words and phrases is many times more sophisticated? If they are clever, they have some back office program working on everything that currently stumps Siri. So as Siri gets used, it is also getting smarter. Since every request goes through Siri's server, they should have a code looking for things that people had to ask twice because Siri didn't work. That should be leading them to real world solutions for real world questions. This should be crowd sourced beta testing, basically. So Siri should be getting smarter very quickly. In fact, I bet you will find Siri noticeably smarter on the iPhone 4S just six months from now.
Forget 3 years from now. Siri doesn't need much processing power or a large database of words.
What Siri says is one of the only things stored in your phone, but Siri is designed to piece things together from other words.
Say siri says to you, "There are five locations within two miles of your current location." Siri stitches her speech together from parts of a word database. Siri might not have a single one of those words in her database on the phone, but can speak them. This is her main processing need.
Aside from that, Siri will create an internal data base that knows Carol Jones is your mom, or Bob Smith is your boss. Mostly everything else is done in the cloud.
I can see Siri hitting the Mac and other Apple devices down the line, but I don't think we'll ever see the functionality of a Nuance product. They aren't going to license it that way for Apple, because it trenches on their bread and butter.
What Apple should do, if they were smart, is take some of those billions they're sitting on in cash, and buy Nuance. In the end, it would cost less than what they'd have to pay to be able to use their technology. Now, for controlling an Apple TV, or simple commands, a license would make more sense for Apple. You'd just never be dictating an entire word document with Siri, and that might be fine for them.
Personally, if they bought Nuance, it also puts them in a whole new software market. Siri fully baked with Nuance technology would be a good draw for people to come over to the Mac/IOS side of things, and they could still sell Nuance software to people on other platforms.
Has anyone tried the Vlingo app in the app store? it's free and looks like it does the same thing to me.
Eh, it's like saying why buy a a sports car with a V8 engine when a moped can still get you to the same place...
The performance pales in comparison. Nuance has the best speech recognition in the industry.