Siri. The End of the Mobile Beginning.

In each iPhone release there has always been one feature that steals the show. In the latest iteration of the iPhone, the iPhone 4S, intelligent, naturally-speaking voice recognition software, Siri, is that feature. Siri will likely represent the end of the beginning for mobile as we know it.  Can you be apart of it?

First off, What IS Siri?!

iPhones have long had voice control and text-to-speech (and speech-to-text) capabilities, Siri takes it light-years beyond. The speech recognition algorithm is tied to all the on-board features of the iPhone such as GPS location (where you are right now), specific, backdoor APIs (such as Wikipedia, Yelp and [tooltip content=”WolfamAlpha is a computational knowledge engine.” url=”http://wolframalpha.com” ]Wolfam|Alpha[/tooltip]) and much more.

What this means is that you can ask Siri for the room rate and availability for nearby 4 star hotels, with a pool and [tooltip content=”I think of Siri as a she, but whatever.” url=”” ]she’ll[/tooltip] tell you the results.

The Bad News: What Developers Need to Know about Siri Integration

Sounds awesome, right?! But, for application developers and online marketers, the newest iPhone feature is likely off-limits. It’s pretty clear Apple has no intention of open Siri’s API to [tooltip content=”Though they have given functional API access to a few key players” url=”” ]just anyone[/tooltip].

[quotes]What’s important to understand is that Siri is a task engine–not a search engine. [/quotes]

Siri doesn’t care about your blog, newsletter or your Facebook page. If your marketing or web technology application doesn’t DO something task-based for the user, there’s really no point spending any time integrating with Siri.

That said, applications like OpenTable have already come under fire from users for not integrating with Siri (see OpenTable brag about Siri and then realize they don’t have an open API to do anything with it).

Siri Features on the iPhone 4S

Ok, so now that you get that there’s not a whole lot you can do to integrate with Siri–at least not now, but here are a few of the features Siri does sport to help stop your sobbing: jdmr.co/3i.  The video is also a cool Siri demo.

So, Siri on the Apple iPhone 4S is not the beginning of the end of mobile as we know it.  It’s the end of the beginning.