By David Jackson.

Despite several lowly priced competitors in the market, Apple’s digital tablet iPad is still unrivaled. And though developers from competing firms have tried to create an efficient voice based applications for smartphones, the Siri (used in iPhone 4S) has managed to stay undefeated. However, this time it’s none other than Google that is developing a voice ‘assistant’ technology to rival Apple’s Siri.

Launched in October last year, Siri was devised to be an ingenious personal aid. The application is set to respond to natural language and it answers questions, sets reminder alarms, offers directions and makes calls. Siri has already become very popular among Apple fans but Google is now trying to challenge its monotony as the most effective voice enabled app! 

For ages, the popular search engine brand has had in-house voice technology — as it hired Mike Cohen, the man who started Nuance. But as per recent buzz, Google’s ‘Assistant’ will be an advanced application and will have an edge over Siri in more ways than one. Google will also retain total control of all the layers involved in this application.

The project is of course being handled by the Android team and will involve three aspects:

• Condensing knowledge of the world into a format that a small computer can comprehend.
• Making a personalization layer (and all those experiments with Google +1 are search engine giant’s way of collecting meaningful data for this app)
• Building a mobile, voice-cantered ‘Assistant’ that is less about getting search results and more about accomplishing real-life goals. 

Google has no plans to launch its ‘Assistant’ until late this year. However, by this procrastination, is it not giving Apple a chance to advance Siri far past where it is now? Delay on part of its developers would imply that Google may have to focus on targeting where Siri will be, not where it is now.

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