As announced in Apple's big press event on October 4, the iPhone 4S will include Siri, a voice controlled personal assistant that can carry out commands on other apps. Siri will be one of the leading features of iOS 5 but will only work within the iPhone 4S (see our Hands On with the Apple iPhone 4S; or see the slideshow below for a tour of the new features of the iPhone 4S). If you're not planning to upgrade (or if you just want to try out some fun voice-recognition technology today), there's already an app for that.
In fact, there are at least two, and if you want to get technical about it, there used to be one more: Prior to getting acquired by Apple, Siri had its own app in the iTunes store called Siri Assistant. We reviewed Siri Assistant version 1.0 in 2010. You can read the review to get an idea of how well Siri worked when it was first on the market.
The Siri Assistant app has since been pulled, but two others are still available: Dragon Go! (free), my preferred choice, and Vlingo, which disappointed me in comparison.
I've been trying out all the apps anew in light of the announcement about Siri. I never thought I'd actually use any kind of voice-activated assistance (Why would I talk to myself when my fingers and eyeballs get the job done just fine?), until I actually started playing with Dragon Go! Even when it goes wrong, it's often funny, like when autocorrect goes wrong.
Dragon Go! consistently gave me more accurate results than Vlingo, and it works with more apps and websites. See the comparison chart below. Vlingo gave me a few good chuckles when it misinterpreted me, but ultimately, I wasn't impressed with what it could do.
When I told Vlingo to email me, Jill Duffy, I learned that my name sounds a lot like "jail dusty." I got another chuckle when I asked Vlingo to "Search for the square root of 155," and it asked me which address "155 Root Ave." was the one I was wanted. Vlingo heard me correctly say, "Wendy," so I guess it gets a point for that one.
Dragon Go! had not only better accuracy, but also more functionality. It knew to launch OpenTable.com when I asked it to "book a restaurant reservation." I asked it to find reviews of music stores, and it opened a Yelp page with appropriate reviews. When asked, "What movies are playing tonight?" Dragon turned to Fandango for help. But it also got the square root of 155 wrong, opening a map insterad (I might have said, "solve" instead of "search" or "find"), but on the whole, it handled my requests with more ease than Vlingo.
Vlingo does have settings for both American English and U.K. English, which could turn the tables for people with a British accent (I didn't even try to imitate one to test it), while Dragon Go! doesn't seems to have any dialect or accent preferences at all. The new Siri, when it arrives on the new iPhone 4S, will have English, French, and German options.
As you can see from the chart, the biggest difference with Siri is that it will answer back, which neither Dragon nor Vlingo can. It also purportedly has more "semantic" knowledge, which I'm always wary about in computers. Computer speech recognition has come a long way, even in the last three to five years, but it still has a lot of kinks to work out. Check back on PCMag.com of a review of Siri on the iPhone 4S after it becomes available.