Siri is iPhone 4S-only today; where will it be tomorrow?
Apple is launching the iPhone 4S this week with the recently unveiled integration of Siri, a voice activated "assistant." Siri accepts voice input and can perform a range of actions on your iPhone, including looking up information, adding calendar events, and even composing short texts and e-mails.
Siri shows a lot of promise in realizing human computer interaction using natural language. Right now, however, Apple seems to be wisely keeping the feature firmly in the "beta" stage even as it seeks to popularize talking to your cell phone to get things done. As iPhone 4S users start using Siri en masse, it's worth considering where Apple might integrate the technology in the future. Will talking to computers and devices transcend conventional keyboard or touch input, à la Star Trek?
Right now Siri is limited to the iPhone 4S. Presumably much of the reason for that limitation is that Siri requires a lot of computing power to work. Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky told 9to5 Mac that the Siri app, originally released in early 2010, required a number of workarounds and optimizations to work well on the then-current iPhone 3GS's 600MHz processor. Even with the significant processing boost gained from the iPhone 4S's dual-core A5 processor, however, Apple is still calling the tech a "beta" nearly two years after its first public release.
