SIRI: your personal assistant in the cloud

Found via Scobleizer.

Watch the video till the very end. In the last 4 minutes or so there is a demo.

In essence its a free iPhone app with a fantastic voice recognition engine, that is orchestrating API’s in the cloud.

Normal – not geek – people ask me regularly: “But Peter, what do you mean with “cloud computing” and “semantic web ?”

SIRI is a wonderful example of what’s next. If you want to have an idea what semantic web means in practice, here you go. It’s location aware, it’s self learning, has some eMe elements like profile awareness, all of this in the privacy control of the owner of the profile data.

The dream of the personal butler coming true.

Why this is important ? In the words of Robert Scoble:

Don’t get confused by the awesome voice recognition engine that figures out your speech and what you want with pretty good accuracy. No, that’s not the really cool thing, although Microsoft and other companies have been working on natural language search for many years now and have been failing to come up with anything as useful as Siri.

No, the real secret sauce and huge impact on the future of the web is in the back end of this thing. A few months back the engineers at Siri gave me a secret look at how they stitch the APIs into the system. They’ve built a GUI that helps them hook up the APIs from, say, a new source like Foursquare, into the language recognition engine.

And listen to the two founders on how the back-end of this thing is working, and the other cool stuff they have in mind.

And now start thinking on what you could do with this in financial services:

• Give me the best loan for car so and so
• I want to buy this piece of art and need a credit line
• Find me the cheapest routing for USD payment with cut-off time x
• Get me to …

Would be very curious of guys like Richard Branson of Virgin Bank start to play with this. Or Sean Park with his view on software components in the cloud. How does this change our thinking on building an AppStore for Financial Services ?

I don’t have an iPhone (yet). But i know super-geeks Nick and PeterH have one. Nick, can you test this one, and let me know your candid feedback ?

Check out www.siri.com