Long before today’s announcement that the Siri Voice Assistant would be an integral part of iOS, Siri was a third-party app. It wasn’t as pretty, and not nearly as well integrated, but it had one big advantage that it ran on just about any iOS device.Then Apple bought Siri. It immediately became clear that Apple was making a push into voice and yet, the app stayed on the store. It lived on un-updated, but it lived on nevertheless.
Siri brings a conversational interface to the iPhone which allows you to ask it to perform tasks for you such as find a French restaurant nearby and book a table, look up movie listings, order a taxi, or look up the phone number and address of a local business.Siri is the “mother of all mashups.” The iPhone app is a conversational interface with Siri’s servers on the Web, which tied into nearly 30 different APIs at launch, with more on the way. These include Open Table, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Citysearch, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha.
