Parks Associates found the following:

• 87 percent iPhone 4S owners use Siri at least monthly
• Roughly one third of iPhone 4S owners use Siri “almost daily”
• Initiating calls and texts were the most common Siri-related activities
• 26 percent use Siri to send email daily

More “advanced” functions such as calendaring were less widely used, probably indicating a lack of awareness of those capabilities.

The survey found that 55 percent of respondents were satisfied with Siri; however 9 percent were unsatisfied. Others feel between those polls.

In December ChangeWave found that Siri was the most “liked” feature of the then-new iPhone 4S.

It’s widely believed that Google is developing its own “assistant” Siri-competitor for Android handsets.

Beyond Blue Links!

From the story, we learn things such as:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

and:

The company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called “semantic search,” which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.

and:

Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

Be sure to read the full article. I don’t want to be doing too many extended quotes out of it. But having read it several times myself, I keep trying to understand what’s new here.

Google’s Existing Semantic Search & Direct Answers

Google’s arguably been doing semantic search since 2003, when it began searching for synonyms of the words actually entered. It has increased its understanding of the meaning of words over the years and even did a detailed blog post about this in 2010. Here’s another from 2009:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

As for “spitting out” those “facts and direct answers” that the WSJ story talks about, Google’s been doing that for so long that it’s hard for me to even know exactly when it all began.

Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack from 2009 covers how direct answers were provided in response to a variety of searches, and many of these answers were already integrated into Google for years before that was written.

UPS & FedEx tracking reports, along with flight status updates, a built-in calculator and more. Had it in 2004. Movie information and stock charts? 2005. Music and weather? 2006. Sports scores? 2009.

Here’s Google blogging about “Just the facts, fast” in 2005:

Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we’re excited to introduce Google Q&A.

We’ve pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you’ll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we’ve thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device).

Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.

Google Squared Still Lives

How about extracting facts from pages, to figure out things like the inventor of the telephone or when a movie release will happen. Google touted doing all this using its Google Squared technology in 2010. See here on the Google blog and our own stories:

• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates

By the way, Google even was offering facts like the sexual orientation of celebrities, though this was dropped last year.

Honestly, it sounds like Google is just going to ramp up showing results that come from its Google Squared technology, as well as what’s been built since its Freebase / Metaweb acquistion. The WSJ mentions the latter, but not Google Squared:

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google’s acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities….

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing “extraction algorithms,” or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web.

It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.

Google Squared was closed as a stand-alone service last year, but the technology has remained a part of Google search. These articles explain more about it:

• Google Squared Is Now Live
• Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts

Why If There’s PR Smoke, There Might Be No Fire

If all this isn’t really new, why’s it getting played up so big with the Wall Street Journal, as well as Mashable last month? Mashable even quoted Google talking about its “knowledge graph” for the first time that I’ve seen.

My take is that Google’s pushing these technologies for some good PR, and they are in turn being blown up out of proportion to what will really happen.

Google’s been under intense pressure in some quarters since rolling out Search Plus Your World, pressure that its results aren’t as good as in the past. It’s helpful to counter that type of bad PR with interviews talking up forward-looking technologies. Heck, it’s right out of Bing’s playbook.

Remember Bing & Powerset?

If you believed all the forward-looking stuff that Bing has pushed, you’d have expected Google to have been a whimpering child of a search engine cowering in the corner, at this point.

Why remember Powerset, with all that amazing semantic technology that Bing later acquired? Here, read up on it:

• Powerset Launches “Understanding Engine” For Wikipedia Content
• Official: Microsoft Buys Powerset

Sure, Powerset is part of Bing. Did you notice it making Bing significantly better than Google? Has Bing drawn tons more people over to it from Google for having that technology?

Nope. But that doesn’t stop Bing from talking it up, though it seems to have done less of that lately. Powerset is good technology to have. It might lead to important future improvements. But no instant revolution is about to pour forth from it, nor has it.

Remember Bing & Wolfram Alpha?

Heck, remember when Wolfram Alpha partnered up with Bing? This was after Wolfram Alpha’s factually-based search engine failed to wipe Google off the map, as some assumed it would. Here are some reminders of that:

• How To Overhype Your Search Engine
• Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”
• Bing Launches Wolfram Alpha Collaboration & Several New Search Features

For all that the direct answers were supposed to be important, I can’t even get Bing to trigger some of the examples it touted when linking up with Wolfram Alpha.

Make no mistake. Wolfram Alpha is a cool, useful search engine. In fact, I had a long, excellent conversation with Stephen Wolfram on Monday while at the SXSW conference about how things are going and some interesting things to come. Stay tuned.

But it’s important to distinguish between what’s put out as PR versus what’s likely to happen in reality. Bing’s done a lot of big talk, and when that big talk has done nothing to stall Google’s market share, it still keeps talking big. This past piece from me explains more about that:

• Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan

Why’s Google Talking Big?

Google’s doing some big talk of its own now, which as I said, is probably being interpreted as even bigger than it really is. But why this specific talk about direct answers and understanding?

For one, Google shot itself in the foot last year. At the D Conference, WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg pointed out to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt that Google didn’t do as good as job as Bing in providing direct answers. And Schmidt agreed! From my coverage then:

Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases.

“There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.

There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.

It was crazy. Mossberg wasn’t right. What the hell is “some” cases supposed to mean. In “some” other cases, Google has more. But overall, no one has any idea who provides more direct answers, much less meaningful direct answers. No one. Mossberg didn’t inventory this himself. There’s no third-party survey out there. It’s not like there’s some “direct answers app store” listing answers that you can count.

That was just Mossberg, in my view, saying what he believed in his gut. It was Schmidt, to me, kind of cowering against Mossberg. He is, after all, Walt Mossberg. You don’t just tell him he’s wrong. Even if he is.

As a result, Google positioned itself as being weak to the leading tech journalist on the planet. How do you pull yourself out of that?

The Siri Problem

I know! Maybe you start talking about all those direct answers you’re going to do? Make sure you do that fairly quickly, because you’ve got another problem brewing.

While your latest Android 4 mobile operating system has arguably made it harder for people to search by voice — and while most Android phones still haven’t been upgraded to it — those iPhone 4S phones all equipped with Siri sold like hotcakes.

What’s Siri doing? Sending some of the searches people do not to you (as you’d think that deal you have with Apple would require) but instead over to Yelp and Wolfram Alpha.

You know, like 25 percent of the voice searches people are doing with Siri. That’s a lot of searches.

The press noticed that. They also noticed when Apple distanced itself from Google Maps in the latest version of iOS. You even had a financial analyst trying to figure if the end of a Google-Apple deal would harm Google’s bottom line. That got press attention, too.

If you’re Google looking at all this, it becomes even more important to start talking about how you have this Wolfram Alpha-like fact engine that you’re churning up. Heck, you even rolled out a Wolfram Alpha-like graphical math calculator last year.

What To Expect

To sum up, Google’s already said several times over the past year or so that it would be providing more and more direct answers. It sounds like that’s the biggest thing that’s likely to be released in the coming months.

Those direct answers potentially take traffic away from a relatively small set of sites that try to serve up direct answers, such as the height of Mount McKinley. That’s sad for those sites, but it’s good for the searcher. And it shouldn’t impact the much larger set of sites out there with broader information.

Indeed, you can already see this now:

You can see the direct answer at the top. The three arrows from that area show how some of the sources also get surfaced as regular results. Below that, the fourth arrow highlights how another site appears.

Having the direct answer might prevent some searchers from clicking through to any of these. But with the answer already in some of the page descriptions, they probably weren’t clicking much already.

There have also been reports that Google’s working on a better version of Google Voice Actions, a version that’s more assistant-like, in the way Siri is. It might even get called Majel. That sounds reasonable, especially given how long various Googlers have talked about wanting to have a Star Trek-like computer (as voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry).

But in the end, for all that the search engines have talked for years about going beyond “10 blue links,” I’d be surprised if the changes the WSJ story today talks about dramatically alter what we see now on Google. More answers, sure. But those 10 blue links will still likely remain the core of what’s shown.

For Google’s part, when I emailed for any comment, it replied with: ”We have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

I’ll be following up to see if I can pry anything more on-the-record about this.

Postscript: Google’s Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search efforts and who was cited in the WSJ story, has posted to Google+ to say:

Some recent news coverage about Google has sparked interest in where we are and where we’re headed in search.

Let me just say that every day, we’re improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible. In doing so, we convert raw data into knowledge for millions of users around the world. But our ability to deliver this experience is a function of our understanding your question and also truly understanding all the data that’s out there. And right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited. Ask us for “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is.

In 2010, we acquired Freebase, an open-source knowledge graph, and in the time since we’ve grown it from 12 million interconnected entities and attributes to over 200 million. Our vision for this knowledge graph is as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge — an endless cycle of creativity and insight.

But as I explained in an interview last month [ED note: the Mashable interview I mentioned above], our initial steps towards this virtuous cycle are indeed baby steps. So stay tuned for updates on what will continue to be a long road ahead.

The last part is key in all this: “the long road ahead.” I think that underscores the point of what I’ve written, that you’re unlikely to see a massive change to how Google search looks and operates in the near term.

Related Articles

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• How Siri Patches Up The iPhone’s Voice Search Weakness Vs. Android
• Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
• Why Siri + Yelp = Useless Google Maps On The iPhone 4S
• Not Just Google: Siri Searches Bing And Yahoo Too
• Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri?
• Google Faces “Innovator’s Dilemma” As It Prepares Response To Siri
• US Subpoenas Apple For Details About Default iOS Google Search Deal
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

While Google has done many things to make it easier to get data and queries into smartphones with voice search, visual search, specialized apps and Google Instant the company still doesn’t deliver “answers.” It delivers a mobile-optimized version of its PC experience.

Google now faces an “innovator’s dilemma” of sorts as it seeks to adapt search and SERPs to a mobile-centric internet going forward. That dilemma has been made more acute by the advent and popularity of Siri.

Apple’s Siri, which will probably be extended to the iPad and maybe “Apple TV” this week, has put some near-term pressure on Google. Siri is more task oriented and “transactional” than Google Voice Actions. It’s also quite likely that Siri will later connect to a broader set of developer and publisher APIs and deliver “search results” that are much more specific and “deeper” than what Google does today on smartphones.

Today Siri ties in to WolframAlpha and Yelp for local search results, quite awkwardly in the latter case.

In an extreme scenario Siri totally replaces or marginalizes the Google mobile SERP, enabling users to navigate to preferred apps or accomplish tasks without the intervention of “search results.” For example, the pre-Apple Siri allowed users to ask for “a reservation at XYZ restaurant at 7pm on Friday” and be taken directly to the OpenTable reservation page — bypassing the navigational SERP altogether.

A lot depends on what Apple actually does and how quickly it opens up Siri to third party APIs. Google understands and sees this “disintermediation” scenario very clearly, and is preparing a more complete response to Siri for Android. This involves “artificial intelligence” and machine learning together with personalization wrapped up behind a voice interface with more “personality.”

While Google’s pre-existing Voice Actions and voice search are effective, they’re more limited than Siri and have no personality. A number of recent videos produced by Motorola show Google Voice Actions working faster than Siri (because of 4G), but this obscures other limitations of Voice Actions and avoids capabilities of Siri.

An article in TechCrunch over the weekend asserts that Google is busy working on its Siri alternative (formerly called Majel, the actress and wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry). That initiative was described as follows:

The project, helmed by the Android team with the involvement of search engineer Amit Singhal, has three parts according to a source.

1) Get the world’s knowledge into a format a computer can understand.

2) Create a personalization layer — Experiments like Google +1 and Google+ are Google’s way of gathering data on precisely how people interact with content.

3) Build a mobile, voice-centered “Do engine” (‘Assistant’) that’s less about returning search results and more about accomplishing real-life goals.

Google has wanted to emulate the talking computer on Star Trek since long before Siri appeared. However, Siri has added new urgency. Siri is a major driver behind iPhone 4S sales, which have helped close the gap between the iPhone and Android. The recent acquisition of Alfred (from Clever Sense) is part of this larger effort by Google to build a new “intelligent assistant.”

There are various Siri alternatives now in the market from third party developers including Nuance (Vlingo), Evi, Speaktoit and Cluzee, among a couple of others. They’re trumpted as “Siri Killers” or “Android answers to Siri.” The truth is that none of them quite measures up to Siri. Many will disagree with that statement but that’s my personal experience with each of them.

If Google manages to build an effective assistant, which it’s certainly capable of, it will need to balance its delivery of “answers” or trans-actionable responses (e.g., the OpenTable scenario) with its continuing need to monetize mobile. Marginalization of the SERP will potentially diminish Google’s mobile revenues, which the company does not want and cannot afford to do.

Accordingly it must balance the “answers not links” mobile imperative with the need to protect and grow mobile search-ad revenues. In this way Google confronts its own version of the “innovators dilemma.”

Related Entries

• Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
• Alternatives To Siri: Google Voice Actions, Nuance, Vlingo
• Siri, Search & The Abortion Controversy
• Why Siri Can’t Find Abortion Clinics & How It’s Not An Apple Conspiracy
• Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri?
• Clever Sense: A Mobile Search Engine That’s Like “Pandora For The Real World”

Here’s how Clever Sense itself described the functionality behind Alfred:

The Extraction Engine built into the Clever Sense Platform curates large amounts of unstructured crawled data by leveraging natural language processing, statistical machine learning, and data mining algorithms.

As it reads through the data, the Extraction Engine learns meaningful concepts that are descriptive of physical items in the real world. These concepts constitute the foundation of the Clever Sense Interest Graph. The engine further leverages social interactions like check-ins, likes, and ratings to enrich the Interest Graph. It calculates similarities via graph-based algorithms using these social interactions.

Before the launch of Alfred earlier this year I spoke at some length with CEO Babak Pahlava. It’s not clear how much traction the app itself had prior to the acquisition. The local space is pretty noisy and  my guess is that Alfred was struggling to get attention; it had recently been redesigned.

The technology that Google is getting from Clever Sense (and the people) will greatly enhance its local recommendations capabilities, which are fairly embryonic. Google clearly sees personalized local recommendations as an important part of its local product(s) going forward. Google+ may also figuring increasingly into this project as well.

There’s a way that Clever Sense may also become part of Google’s answer to Siri, which is a natural language understanding technology (rather than a pure voice search tool). This probably isn’t the primary motivation but perhaps be one of the “top three.”

The video below describes Clever Sense more (the app was called Seymour then):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our past story, Clever Sense: A Mobile Search Engine That’s Like “Pandora For The Real World”, also covers it more.

Siri Leans on Google

If you say to Siri, “What can I ask you?” it returns a list of the categories of things it can do. However when I rephrased the question slightly and asked “What can I do with Siri,” it sent me to a Google search result.

Indeed, Siri is not a Google killer. It relies heavily on Google search for things it can’t do or answer. For many users Siri may become the voice front end to Google search on the iPhone 4S and beyond. We may see Google’s query volume on the iPhone increase and not decrease accordingly. (The conventional wisdom is that Siri is a direct threat to Google but the reality is somewhat more nuanced — so to speak.)

What Can You Do with Siri?

In less than a handful of days since the first demo phones were distributed there are already hundreds (maybe even thousands) of articles discussing and evaluating Siri’s capabilities. But most iPhone 4S owners will need to play with Siri for a few days to understand how best to use it. Here are the kinds of things you can do with Siri:

• Initiate calls
• Find friends/family members (relies on find my friends account)
• Play music
• Send texts/emails
• Create notes
• Create calendar entries
• Set alarms
• Get directions
• Get answers to factual questions
• Search the internet

You can do many (but not all) of those same things with Google Voice Actions already. I’m sure that Google will quickly be working on ways to improve Voice Actions to minimize or eliminate Siri as a competitive advantage for the iPhone.

Siri More “Conversational” than Google Voice Actions

Siri uses Nuance speech processing technology on the front end to recognize and capture speech “utterances.” (As an aside, Nuance has its own “assistant”  in the form of the app Dragon Go!) Siri’s “secret sauce” involves its capacity to understand your question in a natural speech form rather than relying on keywords or rigid protocols to initiate specific actions. Google’s technology was developed in house and is somewhat more rigid than Siri. It requires certain key phrases or words to invoke particular actions.

Nonetheless, Google Voice Actions is impressive in its own right and can do a great deal. But my guess is that most Android owners haven’t used it much beyond voice search or using speech instead of the keyboard to dictate emails or texts. That may now change as Android users, seeing the hype around Siri, explore the broader potential of Google Voice Actions.

Siri Has “Personality”

What Siri offers that is not equally true for Google Voice Actions or Nuance’s Dragon Go! is broad and deep integration into the phone and a more conversational style of interaction. This is subtle but meaningful in comparing the experiences of using Siri and Google Voice Actions. Siri has personality whereas Google Voice Actions does not. Siri is also generally more intuitive. In terms of most features, however, Google Voice Actions and Siri are fairly comparable — though Siri does more things.

Google Voice Actions does a great job with web search, initiating calls, emails and texts. It doesn’t really do notes (it turns them into emails), calendar entries or alarms. In terms of local search and directions, Google does a better job (chiefly because of Google Places and Navigation).

Comparing Results

Below are some informal comparisons of a range of queries using Google Voice Actions and Siri on the iPhone 4S.

What is the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco?

Google: Google provides its familiar Places Web search results, showing a number of Japanese restaurants in San Francisco. You can then call or click into the Google Places profile pages for reviews and additional information.

Siri: For most local queries you get a list of businesses from Yelp, ranked by reviews. If you scroll to the bottom of the list you can access Yelp itself and get a great deal more information — though this capability is buried. (If you’ve got the app installed it takes you directly to those results in the app.) However, as Danny wrote yesterday, if you click through on any of the individual listings from Siri you’re taken to a Google Map but there’s no additional content or information. It’s a big disappointment and generally weak experience.

Find the closest gas station

Google: Google provided a reasonably good list of Places results showing gas stations nearby

Siri: Siri delivered a more locally accurate list in terms of proximity to me.

When is Hanukkah this year?

Google: Google delivered an answer at the top of search results

Siri: Siri answered the question without sending me to the web. There’s a way in which this is more immediate and satisfying than looking at a SERP with lots of links. (However that’s a matter of personal preference.)

How old is Lady Gaga?

Google: Google provided an answer (25 years old) based on several sources

Siri: Siri delivered a single result (25 years 6 months) from WolphramAlpha

What’s the weather in Istanbul Turkey?

Google: Google offers a nice, graphical display of the weather

Siri: Siri shows a rich five-day outlook for the weather. These two presentations are comparable though I prefer the one on Siri (again, completely subjective)

How many small businesses are there in the United States?

Google: Google sent me to a SERP, with the top result being the US Small Business Administration website that offered a number in the snippet — essentially an answer.

Siri: Siri completely failed at this question, returning a list of businesses near Washington DC.

In Most “Search Contexts” Google and Siri Are Comparable

I did many more queries like this and could go on and on with this comparison. In the end Google and Siri are relatively comparable, though Google delivers better results in some cases and Siri in others. However they’re not mutually exclusive. As I suggested above iPhone 4S owners can use Siri as a voice front end to Google web search. You just say “search the web for  . . .” and Siri initiates a Google search. It’s much easier than launching a browser or the Google search app.

I suspect we’ll see Google query volumes increase on the iPhone as a result of Siri usage. I also believe that Siri will be widely used by iPhone 4S owners. Its centrality on the device and its generally broad set of capabilities will make Siri fairly compelling to iPhone users. As Siri adds more structured data sources over time it will become even more useful. The Siri app had a broader array of transactional capabilities (e.g, OpenTable reservations), which Apple has scaled back for this initial relaunch.

Mainstreaming of Voice and Voice Search

The introduction of Siri as a marquee feature on the iPhone will change the way people interact with their phones and how competitors are forced to respond. Google, with its already powerful voice assets, doesn’t have far to go to match or nearly match Siri’s capabilities. Microsoft also has formidable speech assets but there’s nothing like Siri or Google Voice Actions on Windows Phones currently. RIM will be compelled to develop something comparable or be left further behind.

Many people have commented that Siri can and should interact more widely with iPhone apps generally. I believe that’s probably on the roadmap. Regardless of its current limitations, however, Siri’s introduction represents the mainstreaming of voice applications and voice search. And at the risk of hyperbole I’ll say that Siri also represents something of a paradigm shift in how we will interact with mobile devices going forward.

From Siri To Yelp To Google Maps

Consider this example, which illustrates the situation I’ve repeatedly found to be true with Siri:

I asked Siri for “Places to eat.” It pretty awesomely interpreted that to mean nearby restaurants, a natural language query that Google Voice Actions, as I’ve tested them, disappoints on.

Selecting a restaurant from the nice list, which comes from Yelp and includes star ratings, leads not to the actual listing in Yelp but rather into Google Maps. Once there, you can’t even get to a Google Maps place page with more details about the restaurant. Instead, you end up with only the phone number and address of the restaurant.

And No Going Back

That’s pretty unhelpful. What I think most people would want are more details about the restaurant itself. And after reading those, they may want to go back to the original list, to check out another restaurant. But you can’t do that, either. Siri has no back button. Instead, you have to speak your search all over again.

The Full Yelp Experience

Now consider this:

That’s a search using the Yelp app on the iPhone. I wasn’t able to speak to the iPhone 4S and have the first screen of restaurants appear, so there’s no “wow” factor. Instead, I opened Yelp and picked restaurants the old-fashioned way.

After doing that, I selected a restaurant and got what you’d think Siri should offer, a page with more details about the restaurant, with the ability to drill down even further as shown on the third screen — and always the ability to go back.

Google Doesn’t Do Natural Language Well

As I said, Google does pretty badly with the natural language queries that Siri is designed to handle. Here’s an example of when I spoke “Places to eat” on my Droid Charge:

There’s no nice list, not even any localization going on, plus you get an ad shoved in a the top, among the disappointments.

But Bests Siri On Standard Search Experience

However, speak your search not as a natural language query but as people might typically type — “Restaurants” — and Google does better. Consider first Siri:

It’s the same disappointing system I described at the start — a nice list, but without the detailed follow-through that you’d expect. Now that same search spoken into the Droid Charge (and which you could do on any iPhone, if you have the Google Search App that allows speech recognition):

I have to scroll on the results that appear to get to the nice list — Google could improve there by making those higher up. But once I do, it’s easy to drill in and get more details about any restaurant, and then go back to the original list.

More Testing To Come

It’s probably fairly easy for Apple to fix things in Siri so that the results lead further into Yelp’s listings. I’m surprised they aren’t this way already. Hopefully, it’ll happen.

Also, expect more reviews of Siri from us shortly. We’ve only just gotten our collective hands on the iPhone 4S through retail channels, so this weekend will be a lot of testing time.

Siri is more “transactional” than search, taking users to an “answer” or a page where a task can be completed (e.g., making a reservation on OpenTable, creating a reminder or calendar entry). However it can also take users to a list of results (“best sushi nearby”). As I wrote in February 2010, before Apple bought the company, Siri is not a search engine but you might use it like one.

Beyond retrieving information Siri controls a range of functions on the device that includes finding music, calling, calendaring, texting and other capabilities.

Google Voice Actions offers a “more beta” (not “more better”) version of what Apple showed on Tuesday. Voice Actions aspires to the same speech-driven interactivity with the device, however. After the Siri unveiling it’s a safe bet that Google is working on beefing this functionality up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Microsoft has significant speech assets also and nothing really comparable to Voice Actions or Siri for Windows Phones. However I suspect Microsoft will be working on it for a future OS update. We might even see an acquisition or two to accelerate time to market.

Beyond Apple and Google there are other companies that have offer Siri-like “assistant” capabilities, though not at the level Apple demod on Tuesday.

Nuance Dragon Go! (only for iPhone now) offers a range of similar speech-initiated functions: get weather, movie showtimes, local restaurants, play music and general search results. Nuance is a speech technology company that also powers the Siri app and probably has a role in the new Siri Assistant for the 4S.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nuance is largely an enterprise-facing company but has a number of consumer products beyond Dragon Go!, including dictation software for PC and mobile and the Android Flex T9 keyboard (very good by the way). Nuance says that its speech-processing capabilities are unrivaled and it offers a developer SDK to enable voice control of mobile apps.

Vlingo is a Nuance competitor and a company that offers a similar “assistant” product that is powered by the company’s speech technology. It has been seeking to fill the space that Siri “vacated” after being acquired by Apple. Vlingo is available for both the iPhone and Android.

Click here to view the embedded video.

CleverSense’s Alfred App is also trying to position itself as a kind of personal butler or assistant. It offers narrower functionality than the Nuance and Vlingo apps and doesn’t have a built-in speech capability. It’s a “serendipity engine” that delivers local business recommendations based on a kind of “genome” methodology similar to how Pandora works.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are the original Siri app demo video from February 2010 and the new iPhone 4S commercial that showcases Siri.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can see from comparing the two that Siri has been greatly enhanced and its role expanded. It’s very difficult to predict the new Siri’s impact on consumer behavior yet. In part it depends on how well the iPhone 4S sells, though Siri will help differentiate and sell it. But it could be significant if the functionality can live up to the expectations set in the Apple keynote and in the commercial above.

Ever since Google unveiled Android and it became a formidable competitor to the iPhone, there’s been speculation about whether Apple would build a search engine. The prospect of developing search technology and building an index was very likely undesirable to Apple (not that it was ever seriously discussed). But with Siri Apple has cleverly created a core utility that will probably ultimately compete directly with search.

Siri SEO anyone?

Related Entries

• Apple Delivers iPhone 4S With Siri Voice “Assistant,” Disappoints On iPhone 5
• With New Siri Promised For iPhone 4S, Apple Pulls Existing Siri From App Store
• Apple Buys Mobile Search App Siri
• Google Brings Voice Search To The iPhone
• Yahoo Adds Voice Search To iPhone App
• Live Blog: Google Announces “Voice Actions” & “Chrome-To-Phone” For Android
• Google ‘Voice Actions’ Eases Search (& More) On Android
• Google Voice Search Adds Personalization
• Report: Voice Searches 3X More Likely To Be Local

Voice Actions: A Spoken Magic Wand

I’ve used various Android phones with Google Voice Actions since Google first rolled them out in August 2010. They’re amazing. Press on the search button, speak a command, and the phone works its magic.

It’s very, very cool. I got a reminder of that a few months ago when visiting with a friend who was still using an old dumb phone. When we were talking, and a question about something came up, I whipped out my phone and spoke the question. Within a few seconds, Google search had delivered me the right answer.

Later, we were driving somewhere, not sure of the exact address, so I spoke “Navigate To” and the destination. Within seconds, the phone had brought up Android’s GPS feature, found the location we wanted and was giving turn-by-turn directions.

“How did you do that,” my friend asked.

I explained that it was part of Android, and that I could do other cool things. I spoke “Text” and her name, along with a message. In a few seconds, what I said magically appeared in a text message on her phone. That made her want the phone even more. By saying “Call” plus her name, I was calling her phone.

“I want this!” she exclaimed.

Apple’s iPhone Was Lacking

This is someone who should be a natural Apple customer. Her husband uses an iPhone. They own several Apple computers. But she wanted this phone that I could talk to, and get answers from, or make do things without pecking away at a keyboard, on screen or otherwise.

Knowing that my friend already had so much Apple in her life, I couldn’t recommend that she get an Android phone. Instead, I looked to see if there was a way that I could make some of what my Android phone did happen on an iPhone.

I mentioned that there was the Siri app. Some people have sworn by this app, including our technical director here, Michelle Robbins. But when I looked at Siri in the past, I just never found it that fast or super impressive, versus other ways I personally could search by phone. Fair to say, it wasn’t one of the most used iPhone apps out there. In fact, plenty of people first heard about Siri only today, I’d say.

When I did some spot checking of Siri against common Google Voice Actions last year, I found that Google also kept winning. So Siri was a possible solution for my friend, but not for the things she’d seen me do on my Android phone.

Beyond Siri, there was (and still is) Google Search By Voice for the iPhone, part of the Google Search app. That would allow her to speak her searches, but it still fell short of being a match to what Google Voice Actions were doing to complete tasks, and the ease in how they did that.

In the end, I said she’d be better off with an iPhone (and as it happened, that’s exactly what she got the next day from her husband, for her birthday). But if she hadn’t been in an Apple household, the voice features of Android might have pulled her over to that world.

The Siri Solution

That’s what Siri patches up, one of the big areas where Apple’s iPhone was weak against Android. When I did my last review of Android phones, Verizon 4G Android Faceoff: HTC ThunderBolt Vs. Samsung Droid Charge, I also covered the iPhone — and this was one of the four weaknesses I named:

In the end, I still find myself feeling a sense of relief when I go back to using my iPhone. The interface of native apps feels better. The overall experience feels better. The phone is more compact. It just seems to work better.

I sometimes wonder why I’m wanting to use an Android phone at all. But then I remember my three key reasons which are now joined by a fourth:

1. Google Voice Actions
2. GPS Navigation
3. Google Voice
4. 4G speed

Siri looks to go beyond what Google Voice Actions does now (and hey, Apple, how about letting us to your press event next time, so we can actually demo these things).

Does It Work That Well?

Another key is how well Siri actually works in real-life. The demos look impressive. Demos always do. Here’s both a commercial:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And a hands-on demo  that look great:

Asking Siri to do things of all types, not just things demoed, however, will be telling. If the feature only works for some things, and not others, that’s frustrating for users.

Encouragingly, Engadget said Siri worked as well as demoed when they tried to “pysch it out.” It would be really surprising if Apple rolled it out without it actually being pretty good. For the most part, if Apple releases something for prime time, it really is ready for prime time — though the “Beta” moniker added to Siri (it wasn’t “beta” as an app) gives Apple some unusual wiggle room. I can’t recall Apple rolling out much of anything as a beta.

Seeing that the existing Siri app has been pulled from the App Store and likely from all existing iPhones as of October 15 suggests something else — that the new Siri depends more heavily on local processing that Google Voice Actions and Google Voice Search, which process in the cloud. Making Siri only for the iPhone 4S might be because only the iPhone 4S has the processing power required. Also buried at the end of the commercial above, some fine print about “a wi-fi connection may be required” makes me wonder about exactly when this is an issue.

Will Android Step Up? Still Has GPS, Google Voice…

As for Android, a key question there is whether Google’s going to be able to match Siri as part of its big mobile event with Samsung next week during CITA, where it’s widely expected that a new “Nexus Prime” phone will be unveiled along with the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system.

Overall, as I look at the strengths Android has versus the iPhone, Siri does seem poised to hurt one of them, or at least help level the field. But Android still has over the iPhone free turn-by-turn GPS, which is an incredibly powerful feature, one you start using it.

Android also continues to have better integration with a different voice service, that of Google Voice, where you can have one number that you point to any of your phones.

As for the 4G aspect, the iPhone 4S remains a 3G phone despite Apple’s claims of better speeds through smarter antennas. If you’ve ever had true 4G speed as provided by Verizon, which does the best of all the carriers I’ve tested (that includes AT&T and Sprint), 3G is no match.

Expect more from us on how Siri seems to measure up. We’ll be doing a head-to-head match against Android down the line, probably after we wait in line for an iPhone 4S.

Related Entries

• Apple Delivers iPhone 4S With Siri Voice “Assistant,” Disappoints On iPhone 5
• With New Siri Promised For iPhone 4S, Apple Pulls Existing Siri From App Store
• Apple Buys Mobile Search App Siri
• Google Brings Voice Search To The iPhone
• Yahoo Adds Voice Search To iPhone App
• A Tale Of Three Android Phones: Droid 2, Samsung Fascinate & Google Nexus S
• Verizon 4G Android Faceoff: HTC ThunderBolt Vs. Samsung Droid Charge
• Google Building Instant Translator Companion
• Live Blog: Google Announces “Voice Actions” & “Chrome-To-Phone” For Android
• Google ‘Voice Actions’ Eases Search (& More) On Android
• Google Voice Search Adds Personalization
• Report: Voice Searches 3X More Likely To Be Local
• My Life With Google Voice Number Porting, Six Months In

In the US it will reportedly be offered by three out of the four major carriers. T-Mobile was left out. However the phone doesn’t appear yet on the Sprint website.

The Wall Street Journal had run a much publicized article on how Sprint was paying $20 billion over three years to Apple for some kind of exclusive on the “iPhone 5.” Any evidence of that arrangement was totally absent, just like the iPhone 5 itself.

Apple also finally rolled out its voice “assistant” Siri, which was further developed and enhanced after the acquisition of the company of the same name last year by Apple. Siri emerges as a more polished version of Android’s Voice Actions and has the capacity to substitute for search (especially local search) in some situations. We’ll have to play with it “hands on” before any conclusions can be drawn about how useful it is or how much search it can/might replace.

Among other things Siri can operate as a voice front end (actual speech processing is provided by Nuance) on directions: users will be able to ask for directions to place X and be taken to a (Google) map. However the iPhone itself doesn’t deliver turn by turn navigation as Google does. There are third party iPhone apps that can however.

Google and the whole Android ecosystem can breathe a sigh of relief. Fewer people will be buying the iPhone 4S, which seems like an incremental upgrade, than probably would have bought a redesigned iPhone 5. Disappointments include: lack of a larger screen and the lack of 4G support — though Apple tried to claim that its 4S would be just as fast as some 4G phones.

While the 4S is likely to sell well it won’t stop Android’s momentum. Android phones now have sexier hardware and new ones are being released monthly. The iPhone’s design feels somewhat “stale” by comparison. Overall the guts of the device are a significant upgrade from the iPhone 4, however.

There is an iPhone 5 in development. It probably has a different physical appearance and a larger screen. The question is what’s holding back its release and when will we see it?

There’s a ton of additional coverage and commentary on Techmeme.

Postscript: See our follow-up post, With New Siri Promised For iPhone 4S, Apple Pulls Existing Siri From App Store.

Postscript 2: Here’s an Apple commercial of the new Siri in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

CNET has a live demo they did, though they seem to be asking some of the same questions that Apple demoed

Postscript 3: See our follow-up post: How Siri Patches Up The iPhone’s Voice Search Weakness Vs. Android.

With Voice Search for the desktop, which is a feature of the Chrome browser, users click a microphone icon in the search box, and then speak into their computer’s microphone.

Part of the idea, according to Google execs speaking at a media event in San Francisco, is to make voice search ubiquitous and increase awareness, to increase adoption. Already, mobile speech inputs to Google are up six times since being introduced.

Besides “training” users to begin to search by voice, Google says it anticipates the new feature will be used by folks with hard-to-spell or complicated searches, or by those who literally have their hands full.

This new interface will be rolled out to Chrome users on Google.com in English this week.

Google Search by Image for the desktop, part of Google Image Search, builds upon the image-recognition technology the company previously rolled out for mobile in Google Goggles. As in Goggles, users input an image, and Google returns results it believes are related to that image, along with similar images. Users select an image by dragging and dropping, uploading, or inputting an image URL. Installing a Chrome or Firefox extension enables searching by image by right clicking on the image on the Web.

The company demonstrated a few ways people might use desktop search by Image. In one, someone had forgotten exactly where he’d taken a particular picture on vacation. When the photo was dragged and dropped into the search box, Google returned results related to a particular Greek island. The feature works best for images of things that are quite well documented, such as often-photographed tourist attractions or images that are seen frequently online.

Image searches are treated like any other query in terms of privacy and data storage. Google search by image is rolling out today globally.