David Needle
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

InternetNews

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The wait for Siri, a much-hyped virtual digital assistant application for the iPhone, may soon be over.

“Soon, really soon,” said Tom Gruber, co-founder and CTO of Siri, when asked when the free service will be available. Gruber’s appearance here at the Semantic Web conference was one of a few previews the company has given ahead of what’s expected to be a public beta release this year.

The release is highly anticipated because Siri promises capabilities long-featured in science fiction movies that have proved difficult to implement.

Gruber said Siri offers a breakthrough conversational interface that lets users have a dialogue with an intelligent software agent that understands the context of the conversation. For example, users can ask, “Find Italian restaurant for tonight” and the system will search based on your current location using links to the OpenTable site database. You could further refine the search based on the results, specifying a particular city or time, for example.

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