Friday, October 21, 2011

Apple in search business...Dawn of web 3.0 ?

Maybe, this is stale news for many. The initial reason for my search was to find why the name "Siri". I was curious mainly because Siri is a word which means wealth in a few Indian languages. I was also curious to know more about the speech recognition technology used in the Siri application. There were many stories about Siri. While one said Steve Jobs was from Syrian decent and so the name Siri, there was also some pun of the word because of the Japanese meaning of a similar sounding word. Eventually, I hit upon this post which not only revealed the real story of Siri acquisition but also the fact this was Apple's entry into the search business. This led me to my little knowledge about web 3.0 (Semantic Web and personalization). Siri seems to be Apples way of redefining search through web 3.0. So what will Google's response to this be ? Could we see an acquisition of Yap, Vlingo or Nuance to significantly improve its voice commands capabilities ? Google already has all data it needs for personalization (It decides what you want as you start typing..doesn't it ?). It also probably has enough capabilities for building language heuristics. Disruption in search could be something to watch out for in the near future. We have already seen the technology. We need to wait for the widespread adoption of the technology.

Google has replaced the word search in Internet jargon today...Will Siri be the new word for voice based search ("Siri it" sounds funny at least for now) ? I guess only time will tell..

As I try to get answers to more technical questions behind Siri, I thought this was some information worth sharing.

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