Siri, an artificial intelligence-based voice-recognition startup, launched an iPhone app incorporating its technology on Friday.
Spun out from a Stanford University research lab a couple of years ago, San Jose-based Siri had been raising venture capital and adding prominent VCs to its board of directors while it kept a tight lid on the technology it was developing.
On the surface, Siri’s technology recalls speech recognition technologies Google uses for its search by voice feature, or speech input technologies for smartphones based on Android. Dig a little deeper and it’s clear there is more to Siri than basic speech recognition and search.
Siri is not a search engine, but consolidates a number of functions that might otherwise require several different apps. To provide you with all that useful information. Siri relies on a range of notable data partners, including Yahoo Local, Yelp, NYTimes.com, StubHub, OpenTable, MovieTickets, Rotten Tomatoes, and CitySearch.
The voice recognition and interpretation abilities built into Siri have their origins in artificial intelligence research at SRI, a legendary Silicon Valley R&D lab that was also the birthplace of the mouse and of the graphical user interface. Spun out of SRI in 2007, Siri garnered a lot of attention for its ambitious plans to develop a virtual personal assistant.
Siri’s app is connected to a whole ecosystem of Web services and programming interfaces, company materials said. Additionally, Siri has partnered with voice-activation company Nuance Communications Inc., so the user can get a plethora of Web results simply by speaking a command into the phone, or asking a question.
Siri is not a Web application. Kittlaus said Siri devised the application to be native to the iPhone because it relies on the device’s GPS information and user context. Adam Cheyer, Siri co-founder and vice president of engineering, told eWEEK Siri uses JavaScript and AJAX in the browser.
Siri has raised a total of $24 million in funding from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.