Siri was one of the breakout new features on the iPhone 4S when it was debuted last year, one upping Android and taking voice search to another level with implementing actions that would allow people to set a date in their calendar, send a text to someone, or a number of other things. Since then, Google has been working on their own competitor for Android devices dubbed “Majel”.
With the new updates coming to Siri that were announced last week during Apple’s WWDC keynote, it’s being reported that the Android team is accelerating development of their very own voice actions integration. Meanwhile, Samsung launched their own version called S-Voice with the Galaxy S III. It offers very similar features to Siri and was interesting to see them roll out their own rather than wait on Google to roll out Majel.
And that’s the thing. Timing is everything in the World of technology and, quite frankly, Google is a bit behind when it comes to voice actions. The introduction of Siri really caught the market off guard, like with other Apple products, and now competitors are trying to catch up. What will be interesting to see is that since the Android team is speeding up development of Majel, will that negatively affect the end product?
Time will tell. Knowing the smart people at Google, it’s going to be exciting to see what they come up with. They’ve had voice search on Android for a while now which already gives them access to a gigantic database and a constantly improving algorithm. It’s very likely that Majel will only come to Android 4.0 devices and above, though that won’t stop developers from trying to bring it to Android 2.3 ROMs.