The reason that the term “Siri-like” is appearing so often is that there has been an acceleration in the introduction and marketing of new speech-enabled services. One that’s worth noting is SingTel deFIND, a version of voice search that is tailored specifically for “the unique style of English” that is spoken on the nation-island of Singapore.

SingTel turned to UK-based Novauris to build the corpus of localized utterances. The two companies have successfully introduced an application that delivers details on local shops, restaurants or retailers when a user simply says the name. Users can also search by category (e.g. Filipino restaurant) and the application will use GPS and SingTel’s “InSing” database to show what businesses are nearby.

In the coming months, we expect to see the introduction of speech-enabled mobile search and assistance apps to accelerate and that means there are lots more opportunities for firms that specialize in this sort of localization.

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Initiatives and contests like this one illustrate one more reason why Apple’s introduction of Siri is a signal event for mobile speech. The “application” (placed in quotes for reasons I will explain shortly) has its limits. In fact, it is not really an application in the traditional sense of the word. Like many of the downloadable “speech-enablers,” Siri defies categorization. There are “command and control” elements that fall in the category of “utility.” There are dictation and messaging components that make it a “communications” app. Finally, there are (or were) the links to 3rd party web sites that enabled Siri to transform the iPhone into a personal assistant.

The pros and cons of the speech-based mobile assistant were tossed around most recently when Google’s Andy Rubin dismissed the idea at an AsiaD (an All Things D conference). The gist of his criticism was that he’d “been-there-done-that-and-it-failed,” with reference to two speech-enabled personal digital assistants. One was General Magic, which was spun out of Apple Computer back in 1990 and had a few, high-visibility partnerships, including Sony, Motorola and AT&T among others.

In hindsight, Rubin may see General Magic as a failure but, in fact, its engineers designed and developed a new operating system (Magic Cap) and scripting language (Telescript) that were precursors VoiceXML and efforts to create tools that support agile programming for speech-based, conversational interfaces. The technologies that started in General Magic live on in the automated speech offerings of GM OnStar. And somewhere among the intellectual property vault owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures are General Magic’s patents, which were bought at auction in 2002.

Rubin also made mention of Wildfire Communications, Inc., a company founded by Rich Miner, who is now a partner at Google Ventures. But Wildfire’s experience is quite different from General Magic. Founded in 1991, Wildfire built a very loyal following for its speech-enabled services which, at the time, were largely built around management of voice and telephony functions, like voicemail management, call origination, call answering and the like. In 2002, France Telecom’s Orange Wireless bought the company for $147 million and offered the service to its mobile constituency.

At the time, the service was well-received by mobile customers but, because it was originally engineered as an enterprise app, Orange realized that it would have to re-engineer the underlying technology platform in order to offer the service in sufficient scale. Instead, the telco opted to shutter the service in 2005. As this article by Tim Richardson in The Register explains, shutting down the service took longer than anticipated because of the protests of a loyal following of Wildfire users who, to this day, feel like Orange was too hasty in its decision to cease the offering.

Siri (as an Apple initiative) shares quite a few of the attributes of both General Magic and Wildfire that attracted the attention and imagination of developers. The big difference today is that modern technology around computing power and storage support offering the service economically at scale. In addition, even without a formal API, the creative energy of 3rd party developers can be applied to enhancing the service using tools and scripting languages that have evolved into agile environments since the days of Magic Cap and Telescript.

Google has reason to be dismissive of Siri because it is important to call into question its ability to provide answers to questions that used to be the sole domain of the Google Search box (and therefore a source of advertising supported revenue for Google). But it can equally be argued that Voice Search and Voice Actions on the Android platform will benefit from general acceptance of speech-enabled assistants, like Siri. We have to see whether and when Apple introduces Siri as a downloadable app that runs on other devices and how well it (re)integrates the service with popular destination sites like Yelp!, OpenTable, Fandango, etc. Today Vlingo and Nuance’s DragonGo! have an advantage when supporting mobile ecommerce.

Greg Sterling and I will be issuing a report on “Mobile Speech Applications and Services” in the coming month. In it we will assess current initiatives and provide our insights and perspectives on the ultimate impact on local search and conversational commerce.

Some speech app developers have piled by noting that the service should do more “on the device.” It is crippled when the data link to the server is down (which happens quite a bit over AT&T’s network – at least in SF). I would also note that Apple made no friends by discontinuing the Siri App for those (like me) who have it on their plain vanilla iPhone 4s with several more months on their contracts.

Sight unseen, I take the attitude that this is the reason Siri made the transition from approved app in the iTunes store to “beta” version of a native feature (meaning it ships pre-loaded and accessible through the “Home” button).

I take the attitude that this rendition of Siri is the worst one that the general public will encounter and that it can only get better. This started me thinking of computer graphics for the movies. Anyone who saw the first Star Wars was totally “wow’d!” and had little idea how much better it would get. Meanwhile, the producers of the film were already seeing all its faults and telling themselves that they were spending too much time on the stupid stuff like making sure that the strings holding up models of starfighters.

Even in the days of Pixar, they are ever-improving computer generated images in subtle ways that make for a better viewer experience. The animators of the first “Toy Story” told themselves that “this is the worst looking movie we will ever make.” And so it was.

We should weather the criticism of “SIRIously sucking” that I’ve seen. We can only hope that the data link between device and server gets more consistent because the marriage of AI and speech rec that is required to provide a consistently successful user experience depends on it. And we need a better way for the app to work when the data link is down.

I’m pretty sure that Apple and the Siri folks are already addressing these issues.

On the iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0, holding the Home Button down for 10 seconds will start Siri. For many handsfree Bluetooth earbuds, holding the “activate” key down will do the same. Once invoked, Siri lets phone users speak to their phones in their own words. In the demo, Apple iOS engineer Scott Forstall showed three different ways to get Siri to provide local weather, ranging from “What’s the weather?” to “Do you think it will rain?” [Here's the commercial - complete with Ray Charles in the background - that Apple will be running to support Siri]

On prior versions of the iPhone, holding the Home Button down for 10 seconds invokes “Voice Control” which enables phone owners to use their voice to control playback on their iPhone or initiate phone calls. Deep integration of Siri enables users to treat their phones as a voice-activated assistant with the ability to conduct Web searches, dictate and play back text messages and carry out voice commerce (by search Yelp! or OpenTable to choose restaurants and book seats), in addition to voice dialing and media control.

The introduction of a Siri-powered Voice Assistant represents the “re-emergence” of Siri because a Siri app is already available as a free download from the iTunes AppStore. iPhone owners who now launch the app are greeted with this message:

I’ve been replaced! The new Siri is even smarter and better looking than me [sic], and waiting for you on the iPhone 4S. Ill be leaving for home Oct 15th

This signals that Apple is destined to de-activate Siri in two weeks, when it may move to the home button on all iPhones. But, in the mean time, it enables iPhone owners to use “plain English” (or the language of their choice) to find restaurants, nearby movies by title and showtimes, events and businesses. They can ask Siri about the weather (as was demonstrated in the live demo at the iPhone 4S launch), order a taxi, request reminders and even originate Twitter posts.

Introduction of Siri for the iPhone 4S represented a step forward for the service. Activation with the Home Button simplifies service activation. Close integration with message origination is an important enhancement. Most importantly, Apple – because it failed to introduce the iPhone 5 – in effect made Siri, and natural language interaction over its mobile devices, the center of attention. The only other features that merited mention as bold moves forward were the dual mode (CDMA/GSM) aspects of the new phone – making it in effect a ‘world phone,” and supposedly higher data transmission speeds.

The only step back was the characterization of Siri as a “beta” product. Phil Schiller, head of product marketing for Apple, sounded almost apologetic as he introduced Siri “as a beta version,” as if, were it to fail, he could say, “I told you so.” That said, the demos worked as anticipated and the crowd seemed impressed. In addition to getting weather information in three different ways, Forstall used Siri to set the phone’s alarm clock, listened to and replied to a colleague’s text message and provided instructions to the iPod application.

The relationship of Siri (which is “powered by Nuance”) to Nuance’s Dragon Go! is something of a conundrum. Both let users speak to their phones to use Phil Schiller’s words, “the way they wanna talk.” But Siri is initiated from the Home Button. Vlingo is in the running as well. It has been true to the Virtual Assistant roadmap that it outlined to us earlier this year.

Apple’s announcement of Siri should have a ripple effect as millions of iPhone users recognize that speech recognition works reliably and has been well integrated with the services that they regularly use. It feels like speech enabled mobile services have reached an important inflection point.

True to their word, the engineers at Waze have steadily added to the app’s voice-based features and functions. As noted in this post in the company’s “By the Waze” blog, TTS-based driving instructions have been a feature of the “Commuting Widget” available for download from the Android Marketplace. Then, on September 22, Nuance Communications let it be known that the voice rendering of navigational advice in the Waze applications for both Android and iOS-based devices was using a cloud-based instantiation of its flagship text-to-speech rendering software called Vocalizer Network as invoked from Nuance Vocalizer Studio.

In a separate, but related story, Nuance also announced that it had retooled the packaging of the services and features of the Nuance Mobile Developer (NDEV-Mobile) program. As described in this press release, the new configuration offers third-party developers three distinct tiers to simplify how they use Nuance’s Dragon speech recognition on multiple mobile platoforms, including Windows Phone 7, in addition to iOS, Android and an http-based Web interface. Since its inception in January 2011, the program has registered over 4,000 mobile app developers and, according to the Nuance Press Release, it “has voice-enabled some of the market’s most popular apps, including Siri, Price Check by Amazon, Ask for iPhone, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, RemoteLink from OnStar, SpeechTrans, Yellow Pages and AirYell from Avantar, iTranslate, Taskmind, SayHi Translate, Vocre, Bon’App” among others.

The ability to voice enable search, navigation and translation has captured the imagination and energy of mobile app developers. But the notion of knitting each function together to act as a personal agent is the ultimate enticement.

On the negative side, the TouchPad has been victimized by a flurry of bad reviews and complaints about pricing. On the positive side, Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility fueled speculation that competing mobile device manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, LG and other Android adherents, might look to HP and WebOS to provide a competitive product.

To compete with Apple and Google (cum Moto) HP would have to be at parity or better with their basic offerings, in terms of basic functionality. Both the iPhone and Android phones are speech-enabled both from the home screen and the “search box.” Apple relies heavily on Nuance, while Google benefits from its own extensive investment in both speech recognition and natural language processing. Collectively, they provide a pleasing and effective user interface.

Speech recognition – from voice dialing to form filling and search – has been on the WebOS wishlist dating back to rev 2.0. Version 3.0.0 offered some semblance of voice dialing, but (though I admittedly have not had a demonstration unit to play with) there is no native speech recognition. There is only a short list of independent, embedded speech processing software providers. By acquiring SVOX and now Loquendo, Nuance has steadily reduced their ranks. With WebOS under fire from on so many other fronts (from short battery life to a paucity of applications), the inability to support spoken input is just one more factor in the negative column.

HP is in a major repositioning mode and that is likely to focus almost exclusively on the enterprise market. WebOS is in “hibernation” and “consumer” models for PCs and laptops are being removed from marketing plans. That said, I just got this email promotion from HP (obviously sent by a direct mail robot) marketing the TouchPad and accessories. Obviously, it isn’t over til it’s over.

Yesterday Siegler published this storypinpointing Apple’s new data center in the hills of North Carolina as the locus where at least some of the servers will be running instantiations of both Siri and Nuance-based applications so that mobile and hybrid apps running on the new iOS can take optimize the interplay between speech-recognition or predictive texting, along with application logic and “artificial intelligence” to understand intent and deliver results. As Greg Sterling points out in this post on Internet2Go, Apple’s iOS-based experience has bit of catching up to do vis-a-vis Google’s Android-based devices.

As I noted in this post in August 2010, Google’s “Voice Actions” conditioned both users and application developers to expect spoken utterances to be one of the input modalities across all applications. A month later I described Google’s “home field advantage” when it introduced the many ways that a set of widgets could be used in Android that, in essence, made speech processing “native” to the operating system and therefore, of consistent use starting with the Home Screen and spanning all applications (like search) and utilities (like texting or dictation). Indeed, at Google I/0, Vlingo is showing off the latest version of its “Virtual Assistant” for Android-based phones. On a Samsung Galaxy 2, Vlingo is showing off speech-based access and control to a multiplicity of functions directly from the home page, but [contrary to what I may have implied here before] the Vlingo app connects directly to ASR resources and applications in Vlingo’s cloud.

Apple has been signaling its intent to meet and exceed Google’s speech-based offerings for a number of years now. In doing so, it has formed a broad (but not highly publicized) relationship with Nuance as provider of speech processing and predictive input for a broad spectrum of products and services. Followers of Siri know that roughly a month before its formal product launch in February 2010, it switched from its long-time speech recognition vendor to Nuance. At the time, it was thought to be avoiding a lawsuit.

From the mobile user’s point of view, there is no difference between Native and Captive. Google may have been first to market with speech-enabled services that smooth over the speed bumps between siloed applications. Apple, with an assist from “native” implementations of Nuance-based technology mated with “captive” Siri’s formidable combination of application logic and dynamic, e-commerce oriented data flows will try to meet and exceed Google’s efforts to provide the most pleasing user experience for goal-oriented mobile subscribers. The approach, which has been underway for more than a year now, obviates the need for Apple to spend billions of dollars to buy Nuance, but it will require a long-term relationship akin to the three-year joint development agreement between Nuance and IBM.

Google uses its own speech recognition/dictation resources as well as Google Translate to perform the transcription and translation operations. It is thought to use SVOX’s text-to-speech rendering software to recite the translated output, although its acquisition of Phonetic Arts leads me to believe that the search giant is getting ready to incorporate its own text-to-speech rendering (probably with a human-sounding voice that conveys emotion.

Does Google’s entry spell the end for competing products? Not necessarily. As Greg Sterling noted in a post on Internet2Go, the “free” Google Navigation application for Android phones barely made a dent in Telenav’s business. The take-away is that creativity and attention to a great user experience is rewarded in the marketplace. Google’s technologies for speech recognition, translation and synthesis will continue to be important resources for its own products and services, but other, product-oriented companies will continue to introduce services that successfully bond with customers, even if they compete directly with the technology that they are employing.

Several languages and dialects are supported, as are frameworks and software to support mobile, multi-modal interactions. You can keep up to date by referring to this descriptive page on the Nuance Web site.

It is becoming increasingly evident that we are well into an era that takes us “Beyond the SDK” in the mobile world. While this offering does not fall into the category of a speech API, it does overlap with many of the initiatives that mobile API providers have launched to fire up the creative juices of the app developer community. As the makers of “tools,” “reusable code,” and “development environments well know, developers gravitate toward the well-understood, well-documented and familiar. Spoken input and output from mobile navigation devices and apps conform to those three criteria.