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... parading down the street with a coffin is stupid and melodramatic.

Hey if Stupid And Melodramatic is good enough for Microsoft, why shouldn't we all follow suit?

I don't think they really have, it's fairly simple pattern matching. Take:

Example 1: Siri, tell my wife I'm going to be late home

It'll just be parsed as:

1. Siri - confirms it's a command for the phone
2. Tell - lookup against other terms, alternative for "contact", so do a contact action
3. Wife - found as a contact in the address book
4. Send "I'm going to be late home" to contact Wife

Example 2: "Is it raining outside?"

1. Assume command addressed to device
2. Lookup term categories, "raining" is a weather related term, outside is a place, presume meaning as current location if no further detail given
3. Return weather for current location

A quick Google search pulled up this thread:

http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/threads/can-siri-answer-these-questions.81195/

Have a look at the answers, it struggled with most.

Really, all Siri is doing is splitting the message up and checking terms against defined categories and meanings and creating a probabilistic average of what application and what method for that application to use based on the categories discovered. There are far more advanced implementations of this technology in the business world in the shape of business intelligence tools.

I worked on an application at my previous company that would scrape news stories and search them for our extensive list of client names, it was an engineering firm and we sold to defence, metals, minerals, food industries and once a client name was found it would look for key terms and in a similar way would build up a score for each of these industries we sold to, and would then dispatch the the story to the highest scoring industry (some clients had sites in multiple industries) sales and engineering manager in our firm. The directors loved it because it was like magic to them having the sales and engineering managers for each industry being handed industry stories relevant specific to them, and stories about our clients opening up new sites meant they were aware of a lot of sales opportunity they may not otherwise have been aware of, but despite the success it wasn't exactly the most complex of systems.

This is really far from groundbreaking - you can pose these questions in an equally natural language form into Google search and it'll respond and have been able to for years. I dare say because Google's voice recognition tech is better (it handles accents far better than Siri), because Google translate is better than anything Apple has, and because Google search is already better at figuring out what people want to know, then Google can build something like Siri with little effort, but more impressively have it work in different languages too. I'm not sure if you've used Google translate on Android but it was quite impressive when I played with it a year or two ago, being able to speak into it in English and have it translate and respond to me in French was impressive.

The only part that Google doesn't have is the translation related to things more local to the device itself (i.e. looking up your calendar), but that's trivial compared to what Google search already figures out.

Perhaps Google didn't realise the potential, perhaps they thought people would laugh at it and use it against Android if the poor performance of a multi-second round trip response was widely noticed, perhaps Google knew about Siri and are concerned about patent issues in creating their own version. I suspect a large part is that second point - if Google had done this it'd be bad, but despite it's numerous faults and flaws Apple fanboys are still hyping it up as the slightest thing since sliced bread. It's yet another fine example where the difference between a negative and positive view of a feature is the marketing. One thing is for sure though, Google devs could slap together a Siri killer in under a week leveraging their existing technology because they already have all the component parts.

Wow, you sure have the least facts out of anything I've ever seen. Last I checked the amount of facts there, is zero.
"Yes, they're Evil" Ok, you create a point of your own. WHY? where is the actual explanation instead of a waste of text?

Tell me, since when does open source (which doesn't mean what you falsely imply it does) explicitly say they can't do what is exactly within the apache license, dumbass? That was a link directly from slashdot.

Apple makes all sorts of excuses for lockdowns. They are not real "bad user experience" excuses. They are censorship. . That's not the same as a "bad user experience" as defined by google.

So lets look back. Google makes honeycomb, it looks like shit (and runs horribly), so they say acknowledge it publicly stating "bad user experience". Apple goes anti-jailbreaking and uses the excuse of "it's a bad user experience"? Do you understand the difference between the two? methinks you're somewhere between petarded and a complete fail.

You can hack an iPhone by visiting a webpage,

Not anymore.

Same is true of the Flash vuln -- it was patched by Adobe on March 21.

How does that even make any sense? iOS is quite secure, including not being vulnerable to Flash exploits, and if Steve Jobs only wants people to use iOS as "toys", why does Apple sell five creative and business apps for it?

Just because iPhone is a cool phone doesn't make it the best at everything.

I wonder where you got the idea that anyone is claiming that it is.

You can hack an iPhone by visiting a webpage,

Not anymore.

it also got hacked the 2nd day of pwn2own.

Everything gets hacked at pwn2own.

iPhone is a lot like Windows when it comes to people trying to PWN it, so I would say it is probably one of the riskiest phones you can use.

You would say that, but that doesn't make it true. Risk requires actual malicious code. Android is many orders of magnitude more risky than iOS, due to the simple fact that there has been plenty of malware for Android (some of which distributed on the Android Market). The only iOS malware that has ever existed has been for jailbroken devices--which is to say, for devices which the user has deliberately compromised the security of their device.

How you can think this is the sign of a "risky" OS is beyond me.

Remember, Google has had to use their remote "kill switch" on multiple occasions. The very same "kill switch" that everyone got all worked up over when it was presumed that Apple had it on iOS, but has never actually used.

How does that even make any sense? iOS is quite secure, including not being vulnerable to Flash exploits, and if Steve Jobs only wants people to use iOS as "toys", why does Apple sell five creative and business apps for it?

Just because iPhone is a cool phone doesn't make it the best at everything.

You can hack an iPhone by visiting a webpage, it also got hacked the 2nd day of pwn2own. iPhone is a lot like Windows when it comes to people trying to PWN it, so I would say it is probably one of the riskiest phones you can use.

Market caps are almost the same.

They're both around 200 B and change.

http://www.everythingicafe.com/aapl-passes-msft-in-market-cap/2010/05/26/

http://247wallst.com/2010/05/27/apple-beats-microsoft-in-market-value-msft-aapl/

http://www.9to5mac.com/AAPL-MSFT-345345332

"The problem is that the Iphone is the only phone where "jailbreaking" is necessary to get basic functionality working"

Correct. Something as simple as deleting a call is not possible on the iPhone without jailbreaking, which is shocking because on every cellphone I've used in the past 10 yrs I've had the ability to delete a phone call from the call log and it's a feature iPhone owners have been asking for since 2007. If you want to remove a single call you have to delete the entire phone call log

Honestly I don't know how anyone can use their iPhone without jailbreaking it, unless they're not really using it as a smartphone so they're not installing applications, using data, etc.

Most devices can't. This is why I'm asking. Googling a little, revels IPhone can't act as a Wireless access point by default. http://www.podcastalley.com/forum/showthread.php?t=138655 http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/iphone-modifications/iphone-as-a-wifi-access-point-router-19674.html

Yes with jailbreaking, yes also to wlan for the most part, because it's convenient. But not always.

I prefer an iPhone windshield mount. Puts the phone within range of the steering wheel such that I can manipulate the phone without sacrificing vehicle control. Why bother with an integrated unit?