The iPhone is going to be all about voice. That is what the "Let's Talk iPhone" event in the Cupertino Campus is declaring while unveiling the iPhone 4s and Siri. A turnaround for smartphones which actually reduced the frequency of people talking each other on the phone because of SMS and email.

The Assistant application for iPhones anticipated is going to stick with the name Siri. The program has gone beyond voice recognition for the iPhone. It actually will be a personal assistant. According to the recent Apple event this is what we know about the Siri:

It passes normal language and answers to every query you can have on the phone. If you ask something like "What would be the weather today?" It will answer with a phrase like "Looks like it is going to be a sunny day." and then puts on the weather app to tell you about the weather. It anticipates your next request based on what you tell it. Ask it to wake you up at a certain hour like you normally would a person and it will set your phone's alarm to the time you requested. It does not need special command to complete its tasks like "Siri: Activate map app. Locate nearest restaurant." which can be very unintuitive to normal speech. You could simply ask where the nearest restaurant is without worrying about the proper syntax input.

The Siri can also take dictation. It will be handy for making email messages, SMS or just making a document. It also has a built in dictionary but the demo did not give details if Siri can multitask from taking dictation and asking a question about a word's meaning.

When you ask a question about anything to Siri, it will pull information from the internet from websites like Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, etc. This would be where the search engine part of Siri comes into play.

Siri requires iPhone 4s to function. The iPhone 4s will be available for pre-order on Oct. 7 and available at Oct. 14. It will cost $199 USD for a 16GB model, $299 USD for the 32GB and $399 USD for the 64GB.

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