I'm obviously not doubting the potential, since I haven't seen the app yet, but this article is terribly low on substance.
Honestly, after watching the 45 minute presentation, there were a ton of interesting tid bits I transcribed word for word (that's what you see in all the quotes and the video is embedded if you prefer that).
For skimming purposes, I tried to bold the most important bits in the quotes, so it was straight from Siri's Co-Founder, CTO and VP of Design, Tom Gruber's mouth.
Honestly, skimming through the article quickly myself (it took me 3 hours total to write including watching the 45 minute keynote and transcribing the important bits) I can't see how you think it is low on substance, because there is a ton of it in there.
I'm honestly fascinated to see if Apple open's up the Assistant API to 3rd party developers as the Siri team clearly planned to pre-acquisition. In my mind it makes a lot of sense given the new "verb" world Facebook introduced, and I think developers would have a ball with it.
The technology came out of a government funded project on which hundreds of people worked.
It's iterations ahead of the market and so it's real AI with real use.
It will be useful to most people most of the time.
It can't understand languages other than English.
It can't answer relationship questions.
It may have an open API, in the future.
It may allow you to pay for things, in the future.
It may use social data, in the future.
I guess I'll just wait for the actual release to see why and how this is world-changing. If the product is truly world-changing, I don't think anyone can do justice to it with a blog post. Imagine if people tried to explain Google the search engine like this.
I think it will be fascinating to see what, if any, of these questions Apple has decided was worth tackling since they acquired the product, and which in the eyes of Jobs, were important and useful enough for the masses.
It's going to be a fun keynote tomorrow.
The problem with voice recognition apps is that Google has taught us to get, literally, instant results. Waiting even a second seems way too slow now. That's a very high bar to live up to.
Imagine if Apple built in some Amazon Silk-like ties between Assistant and iCloud? Or if they do some local caching or if Sprint really does have this exclusively and its on 4G?
Amazon Silk-like technology may make sense for ecommerce content (yet to be seen), but it doesn't make sense for complex search queries. The longest time is probably spent in understanding the query and ranking results, not in downloading the content of the results. For the same reason, local caching makes no sense, except for some personal data, which Google also has access to (openly or secretly).