By now we're all used to the "soap-like" goings on at the top of the technology industry so the news that Google and Microsoft had a couple of dig's about Apple's new Siri will come as a huge shock to well...none of you.
With Siri's upcoming launch, and speculation on how much of an impact the voice-controlled application will have within the industry, it's obvious fellow industry leaders are beginning to feel the strain. Google's Head of Android - Andy Rubin was quoted as saying: "I don't believe your phone should be an assistant...Your phone is a tool for communicating," further adding, "You shouldn't be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone." - Fair play, apart from Google's numerous app's unrelated to telecommunication whatsoever and it's Google Voice-Search & Goggles, Google's alternative voice- and image-based ways of interacting with your phone....maybe it slipped his mind?
Microsoft's Windows Phone president, Andy Lee had also mentioned that Siri "isn't super useful." At the same time, he noted that Windows Phone 7 has a degree of voice interactivity in the way it connects to Bing, and thus harnesses "the full power of the internet, rather than a certain subset."
Perhaps its not just being well ahead in the technology race in getting Siri to the table, but the threat that the application poses on technologies where Google and Microsoft are respected leaders. Siri allows searches of Google and Bing when it can't find an answer that merges Wolfram Alpha's natural language query responses with its own easy-to-use, natural language interface.
Siri also acts as a first sift "layer" for users seeking information over the Internet. When you ask Siri the data gets whizzed off by Apple to its cloud servers, where the speech is processed and then interpreted. It is then found if the question is "intelligible, being answerable by Apple itself and thus severely limiting the ad revenue both Google and Bing could see in the future.
There's no way in denying that Siri will change the way we look at our smart devices, and offers a fantastic foundation on which to grow from. Google and Microsoft may well be snubbing the much anticipated Siri, but there's no doubt they'll be working intensely on their own voice controlled applications, if they do indeed find time away from the development of a "handbags at dawn" app.
Laugh as they may, it could come back to haunt them, and comments taken into account - Putting constraints on technology only hinders innovation - a race which Google and Microsoft will surely like to shorten the lead in.
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