iPhone 4S Siri and Samsung Galaxy S2 Voice Talk.. (Video)

Just some thoughts on the new iPhone 4S Siri. While many people are won over by the new iPhone 4S personal virtual assistant, it should be noted that there have been similar apps and implementations on Android phones at least a year earlier. Voice recognition technology is nothing new but it is now set to gain huge momentum with Apple joining the race and popularising it.


With smart phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) merging, people have been using their phones to perform countless tasks. It soon made sense that the phone is sort of like a personal assistant to you. However, unlike a real assistant, you can't just talk to a phone and tell it what to do, at least until the last couple of years. Apple has introduced Siri on the iPhone 4S and Samsung has made Voice Talk on the Samsung Galaxy S2, both of which can take your commands and perform tasks for you. Meanwhile, Google has Voice Actions for its Android OS.

Here's the introduction video on Siri for iPhone 4S by Apple.

Clearly Siri is an advanced voice recognition tool implemented by Apple. Although Apple did not came out with the technology (they bought the Siri company back in April 2010), they certainly improved it drastically and integrated it well with the iPhone, allowing people to perform tasks such as web searching, sms-ing, writing notes, emails and more on the phone just by speaking to it.

While Siri is only available for the iPhone 4S (a key feature for drawing more sales), there have been similar apps like Vlingo on Android for years. Google Android has also introduced Voice Actions last year, where you can tell the phone to call, send sms, do map navigation, web search and more. But one thing that Voice Actions disappoints is that it does not "talk back" to the user, making it less than pleasant to use. Most people would like a human touch like vocal response, after all, you would like an assistant to at least reply when you give an instruction.

However, mobile phone companies like Samsung has also experimented with the idea of a talking personal virtual assistant by having it integrated into their latest phone, the Samsung Galaxy S2 with Voice Talk, which by the way came out four months ahead of iPhone 4S, and sparking a growing interest in voice recognition technology.

I have embedded 3 demo videos of the Voice Talk in action.

Voice Talk on Samsung Galaxy S2 - go to 1:03 for demo.



Another demo of Voice Talk on the Samsung Galaxy S2


A more comprehensive demo of Voice Talk



Based on what we have seen so far, Samsung's Voice Talk can answer your questions and perform tasks for you and talk back to you. One thing that sets it apart from Apple's Siri is that it can be voice activated by saying "Hi Galaxy", whereas you have to long press the home button on the iPhone 4S to activate Siri. There is also an option to turn on "Driving Mode" where the user can control the phone solely by speech, without ever having to touch it. Very impressive. Siri may lack such functions, however, Apple takes it a step further by actually having artificial intelligence. Siri has the ability to understand what you are actually saying and come up with various yet appropriate responses. There is no more need to memorise specific words or commands for the program to understand.

Of course, both implementations are not 100% perfect and they still fumble when they cannot recognise the voice due to accents, languages or the environment. However, given that voice recognition is the direction we are heading, it wouldn't be long before these hurdles will be overcome. There have been lots of research and developments done on voice recognition and the results are unimaginable, but they are still out of reach of the consumers.

It is welcoming to see companies like Google, Apple, Samsung, Vlingo and even Microsoft pushing such technology to the consumers. While Apple now has the upperhand with an advanced Siri, Google is reportedly throwing their own version in Android Ice Cream Sandwich, which will debut on 19 October 2011 (tomorrow!). How will the future of "talking to electronics" turn out?


One thing for sure, our phones will be able to make us laugh..


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