You can find coverage of the phenomenon in dozens of tech publications today, but they seem to trace back to this post on the Apple-centric tech blog called RazorianFly.com. According to the post, the enhancement is very much the result of Wolfram Alpha (an answer-oriented search engine that is integrated into Siri’s search results) integrating with Best Buy’s product database through BestBuy.com’s API. Or, as more than one tech blog put it, Siri now returns the same errors as a search on Wolfram Alpha.

As Shaylin Clark at WebProNews explains in the post above, as a “computational engine” oriented toward asking questions, Wolfram Alpha can be quirky (he calls it “finicky”). But putting speech-based access to comparison shopping that includes Best Buy’s inventory marks progress, even if the results are not always optimal. The point is that end-users are gaining experience with the service. They are learning what it is good at and where it fails.

My empirical observation is that people are being much more patient with Siri than they had been with prior renditions of voice-based “assistants” (like Wildfire, HeyAnita or Webley). One reason is that the service is faster, better, more robust and capable of doing more things than its predecessors. There’s more knowledge in the databases that comprise its available knowledge (heck, it defaults to a search on Google, but it has maps, online music and Wolfram Alpha to bring to bear). It’s very early days and Siri is bound to get better. And it will inspire competing services from Google, Microsoft/Tellme, Amazon, Nuance, Vlingo and a handful of others. Each will add new features, functions, information and APIs to differentiate their services and deliver a better customer experience.

At this point Apple has taken a leadership position by coming to market with a service that’s instantiated as an embedded application that recognizes utterances accurately; determines context and meaning; and then has meaningful integrations with a broad range of knowledge bases so that it starts by recognizing intent and finishes by delivering relevant results. The truly exciting aspect to this is that the the services from Apple and its competitors will continue to evolve and get better.

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.

We met with Vlingo yesterday. The company is previewing some new functionality and we had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about the product and strategy. My question is: why isn't Vlingo investor Yahoo! leveraging the heck out of it? There was some initial fanfare about voice search on Yahoo! Mobile but since then there's been little or nothing.

I think that Yahoo! should aggressively integrate Vlingo into its mobile app as a discovery tool for all types of content and not just Web search. It should also build a mobile version of Yahoo! Answers and think about Vlingo as a front end to that experience. 

Alternatively our friends in Finland (Nokia) might consider buying a company like Vlingo and integrating it as a core component of its handsets — for smartphones and not-so-smart phones. 

Voice will continue to improve as a tool for a broad array of uses on the handset. Apple obviously bought Siri, which is not about voice search per se, but about semantic understanding of voice queries and matching with transactional services. And Google continues to invest in voice and see it as a differentiator. 

Microsoft of course had formidable voice assets but has not fully exploited or marketed them. Perhaps with the release of Windows (Mobile) 7 handsets we'll see a more prominent role for voice on the device. 

But Yahoo!'s got to get into the game more here. 

The optimist in me wants all of the piece parts to work together seamlessly. The reality is bound to be quite different. As was demonstrated by interference in the conference venue, things are bound to go wrong (as the display of Nicolas Cage “animal sex diet” during the demo dramatized). But that did not blind the developer community (or indeed the CEO’s from Intel, Best Buy, Sony, Adobe and DishTV) of the transformative potential of adding “seamless” and simultaneous search to accompany the five hours of TV watching that people are ordinarily doing.

From the RC (Recombinant Communications) perspective, Google claims that development of new applications will benefit from its “open” approach. As described on the Google Developers Blog, the software, OS guts and APIs are the household names of open computing: Android, Chrome and Ajax. The application development toolkits are not fully developed, but they start with the SDKs for Chrome and Android.

From a competitive point of view, Google is treading where Apple (with AppleTV) and Cisco (with its “ownage” of ScientificAtlanta and LinkSys for couchside products), along with Motorola, Philips, Tatung and the mainstream set-top box makers have already done their best to fragment the market. What Google brings to the game as differentiaters is the power of its advertising-based business model along with its experience (and existing functionality) in real-time search/social search, voice search and speech-to-text transcription/translation.

Each of these elements has the potential to spark the imagination of users, as well as the development community. But they are also fraught with risk. Speech-to-text transcription (much less translation) has already created fodder for all sorts of ridicule. Quality is bound to improve over time, but neither transcription nor translation will ever be perfect and much of the early energy should be dedicated to managing expectations.

However, one of Microsoft’s core mobile competencies — voice and voice search — was not on display in the demo. I would have expected deeper integration of Tellme’s technology into 7 and that this would be one of the differentiators or would-be differentiators for the company. Yet it was nowhere in evidence. 

I’m sure that voice search will be available for Bing; but will it be available at a deeper level in the way Google is trying to integrate voice on the Nexus One? That wasn’t the case today and it’s not clear how and whether Microsoft will use voice as the devices roll out late this year. If the company is smart it will seek to voice-enable as much as possible on the device.

Here’s a quick demo of local search from MobileCrunch on the scene in Barcelona: 

But bear in mind, this is just a “beta” version of a rendition of Google Maps for Android phones. To its credit, it appears very flexible and it enables the phone users to use their own terms to say where they want to go. But I don’t come to praise Google, just to give them credit for creating a showcase for the features and functions that other providers of navigation devices should offer. It provides instant legitimacy and credibility for functions that as recently as yesterday were considered “futuristic.”

It delivers on the promise of “Internet-based, GPS navigation.” In its “car mode” it comes close to being totally hands-free and, in the spirit of everything else that Google is doing in this space, it is offered free-of-charge to end users.

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Amazon.com closed a chapter in this saga with a public apology from Jeff Bezos, its founder. I don’t know what the plural of “mea culpa” is (guessing “nostri culpa”), but the following excerpt captures the spirit of his statement:

Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

Yet, deKindling “1984″ was not an isolated incident. It had been routine for Amazon.com to delete unauthorized or pirated titles from Kindle subscribers at its discretion. It is a core capability of Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes and had been applied to several of Ayn Rand’s titles among others. Giving Orwell’s classic the deKindling treatment crossed a threshold primarily because it was so … Orwellian.

News about Apple’s snub of Google Voice came hot on the heels of Amazon.com’s high profile departure from its principles. To be clear, the App Store staff’s approval process has long been something of a Black Box. Amid cries from the developer community to keep the process “open”, the best Apple can do is broadly distribute its specifications, access to its APIs and do considerable hand-holding during the development and approval process. From Apple’s point of view, the fact that iPhone owners downloaded more than 1.5 billion apps from the App Store in its first year of operation speaks for itself. Developers, with visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads, include the iPhone as their targeted smartphone and the inventory of apps just keeps growing.

Taking GV Mobile and an alternative app called VoiceCentral out of inventory is Apple’s right. I think they will discover that it’s bad policy and establishes a precedent that will have a chilling effect on development and delivery of rich phone applications – meaning ones that can be highly responsive to phone users’ fast-changing needs. TechCrunch blames the Apple/AT&T mind-meld. After all, many users of BlackBerry’s and Android-based phones are already using a native versions of Google Voice and discovering the power (and pratfalls) of advanced call management, voice processing and speech recognition rolled into a single app. iPhone owners are bound to want the same capabilities and my belief is that Apple should comply.

Update: Here’s a link to a “Twitition” urging Apple to “unblock” the Google Voice app for the iPhone. [Caveat: As a rule, I don't use a service that requires 're-entry' of an existing account name and password]

Now GigaOm features the opinion of guest columnist Phil Hendrix, Founder and Director or the Institute for Mobile Markets Research. Somewhere behind the new GigaOm Pro’s paywall is a report from immr that professes to explain “How Speech Technologies Will Transform Mobile Use.” It’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart; but at this point I might want to frame it as “How Mobile Use Will Transform Speech Technologies.”

1) Make the option for voice input ubiquitous – We’re getting there. The iPhone 3GS is a high-visibility device, but preloaded or downloaded apps that support speech input are already on hundreds of millions of handsets around the world. In addition, dial-up services for voice-enabled search (like GOOG411 or Microsoft/Tellme’s Bing411) have the potential to be a speed-dial button away when they add new territories and languages.

2) Do a better job of managing user expectations of accuracy – speech rec will never be 100% accurate. Think of all the times that you don’t understand what a person is saying to you on the first try. Why should wireless users expect machines to be any better. It’s important upfront and by multiple channels (demonstrations, video tutorials, Peer2Peer discussions), to make it clear that systems make best efforts to capture what is being said, but may not always “understand” meaning. It may seem like a hard logic to follow, but it is vital for maintaining the technology’s potential and the caller’s low blood pressure.

3) Showcase and support new use cases and tutorials – I think that we’ve only begun to present wireless subscribers with the sorts of options that put the technology in its best light. People love to break these things. It was in this post, that I pointed to the NYTimes technology blog in which David Gallagher logged the many transcription mistakes boldly displayed by Google Voice’s voicemail-to-text transcription.

4) Never make spoken input the only option – Note that I said make the “option” ubiquitous. Under no circumstances should an application require spoken input. Google understands this. So does Nuance, often regarded as a roll-up of speech processing technologies, but really a purveyor of platforms that accept (and in many cases predict) user input in the form of text, spoken words and short codes.

My problem with the NYTimes column and other vehicles for criticism is this: they are largely “descriptive” and not “prescriptive.” Instead of showing how easily broken the new interface is, how about demonstrating what it does quite well. It captures utterances and, like a marginally good stenographer, presents a “rough draft” of what was said, along with some notation of where the input might be “iffy.” Speakers should never think of this as a finished product. At best it should provide a form of talking triage – showing the speaker, or recipient where the transcription may need a bit of work or sculpting.

At base it’s an opportunity to game the system. If people like to make a game of breaking the application (by reading Jabberwocky to Google Voice, for instance), it makes more sense to cast yourself in the role of hero and fix what’s broken in a poorly transcribed message. If voice control is to be “the sound of things to come” for mobile subscribers, it requires a much more concerted effort than the shallow effort to integrate with the iPhone or the one-and-done guessing game that Google Voice plays. Handsfree dialing and text input through a Bluetooth headset or earbud would be a nice start. Well-prompted and choreographed messaging – be it addressing and dictation of SMS or friendly prompts to help originators or recipients triage transcribed voice mail – would be a cool way to start.

Mobile voice is a big area of opportunity. IBM had been working on it for years. Nuance, Google, Vlingo, Microsoft/Tellme, Spinvox, PhoneTag, Yap and a few others are fielding some pretty impressive products and services. Adoption will be no accident and, even though its been years in the making, it is still early days in product and market development. In other words: The Customer Has Not Spoken.

The “spoken Web” conjured up in the article, will ride the coattails of the growth in wireless subscribers. However, unlike their commercial cousins, the speech-enabled contact centers, these “voice sites” run on relatively small servers and are designed to be local or personal in nature. The article’s author calls them “portals through which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospital will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation.” To support speech-based browing, IBM is employing a new linking mechanism called the hyperspeech transfer protocol (HSTP), which is the spoken equivalent the the hypertext transfer protocol which drives the “http://” in a visual browser’s navigation bar.

The development efforts are laudable and are a testament to the pervasive, global movement to extend the power of the Internet to mobile devices. There’s more than a little irony in the fact that the effort is characterized as part of a research effort, rather than a marketing or product development initiative. IBM’s rich history with VoiceXML goes back a decade and a half. It was cultivated by a Speech Products Group in Boca Raton, FL, that for much of its life-span occupied the same building where the original IBM PC was conceived and prototyped in the early 1980s. The Speech Group was successively absorbed into the now-defunct “Pervasive Computing” business unit and then “mainstreamed” out of existence when its core product – called WebSphere Voice Server – migrated into the huge catalogue of WebSphere-branded middleware and application servers.

The coup de gras for IBM Speech took place last January when IBM licensed a good deal of its source code to rival speech processing company, Nuance. In an advisory that we published at the time, we called it a variation of “Win-Win-Win” formula. IBM would get upfront money for its licensed technology, Nuance would have a richer code-based on which to build future products and services and customers would benefit by having better products from both companies.

Instead, it has been back-to-the-future (more accurately back-to-the-lab) for IBM voiceXML efforts. Meanwhile, Nuance and its rivals are vying to make a living by making it possible for wireless subscribers to speak commands, search terms, navigational instructions and messages into their wireless devices. As a result, we anticipate a rich set of commercial products to come out this year. Some of the new devices and services may be “powered by IBM”, but in most cases – as with the “voice sites” and the development of HSTP, they will have a decidedly “alpha” test feel to them.