14 DAY TRIAL // Apple's Siri has Google spooked and it would be worrying if it hadn't. While Siri may not seem an obvious threat to Google, apart from being a feature Android lacks, but it's bigger than that, it threatens Google's very core, search.
The fact is, Siri is a search engine, but it's much more. It's a tool that provides people with answers, be them search results, weather reports, or doing simple arithmetic.
It's the next-generation search engine and something that should have come from Google. Nevertheless, Google is on it, it may be a little late, but it's working on a Siri competitor.
This being Google though, the tool, dubbed Assistant, will do more than Siri, but also rely almost exclusively on Google results.
It's not the first time we've heard of a Siri competitor, but the latest rumors provide newer details.
It seems that the project has graduated from Google X, the experimental division, and is now being worked on at Google proper. Either that, or it's a completely new project.
It lost its name as well, the project was labeled Majel while Google X was handling it. It was also supposed to be ready quite soon, in early 2012. That hasn't happened, of course, and it's probably not going to.
In fact, the new project is expected to bear fruit sometime late this year, most likely as part of Android 5.0, if everything goes according to plan.
It's now called Assistant and it's quite an important project at Google. In fact, TechCrunch, which uncovered the latest details, says that 2012 is set to be the "year of the Assistant."
It's a rather big project, for one, Google wants to have as much data as possible in a format that computers can understand, i.e. structured data, something Google has never stopped working on.
That data then needs to be filtered to cater to a user’s individual needs; this is where the tracking data Google stores comes in handy. Finally, Google is working on a way of surfacing this structured and customized data via a natural language search app, i.e. Assistant, the Siri equivalent.
While the project is focused on Android, it's a search project as much as anything else. The fact that Google search guru Amit Singhal is involved is proof enough. And, once the Android app is out of the way, you can expect the same technology to make its way into Google Search, Google TV and so on.