Apple Siri To Add Sports, Restaurants, Reservations, Movies & App Search

Apple at their World Wide Developer Conference today announced iOS6 with some really nice features to Siri, their voice search engine.

You can see a preview of some of these features at Apple.com but here is a snapshot showing enhancements including:

• Sports Search
• Restaurants with Reservation Booking
• Movie Search & Ticketing
• Search For Apps On Device
• Support for iPad2
• Maps by Apple (see Apple Gets Into Local Search With New Maps App)
• Language Support For 15 Countries
• and more…

Siri uses apps already on iOS to provide answers such as Yahoo Weather, Maps, Yelp and others. It also will search Google, Wolfram Alpha and other search engines, plus a lot more. More on how Siri works, see our Siri category.

Sports Search on Apple Siri

Siri now answers sport related questions on baseball, basketball, football, soccer, and hockey. It can look up schedules, scores, player stats, team standings, upcoming games and it even knows to use your location when you ask about the Giants (i.e. New York Giants or the San Francisco Giants). Here are some screen shots from The Verge:

Restaurants Search On Apple Siri

Siri uses Yelp to help you find restaurants by cuisine, price, location, outdoor seating and so on. It will list out the details of the restaurant with photos, Yelp stars, price range, and reviews. It will even let you make reservations directly from Siri using the OpenTable app. Here are some screen shots from The Verge:

Movie Search On Apple Siri

Find movies by asking Siri. You can search location or showtimes and Siri will return results. Siri will also show you movie trailers and movie reviews for each selection. Siri will also tell you where that film premiered, who directed it, and what awards it may have won. You can even query Siri by actor name. Here are some screen shots from The Verge:

App Search On Apple Siri

One of my pet peeves was not being able to use Siri to launch an app. Now Siri can search for Apps by just saying “launch [app name]”. You can use commands like “play Angry Birds,” “launch Facebook,” or “see my photos.” Those should all trigger their respective apps to launch.

Apple is bring Siri to the iPad 2 running iOS6 as well.

Siri will support additional languages including English and Spanish, French, Canadian French, Italian, German, Spanish, Italian, Swiss French, Swiss German, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese.

iOS6 is available for developers in beta today and will be available to consumers later this Fall.

Apple is baking Siri and its voice search capabilities directly into the OS. From searching, commands, text to speech in apps, to voice control while driving – Apple is taking Siri seriously.

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• Survey: 87 Percent Of iPhone 4S Owners Use Siri Monthly
• Is Apple Is About To Launch A New Global Search Engine?
• Apple’s Siri Drives 25 Percent Of Wolfram|Alpha Queries