After a very, very long appetizer course, Apple got down to the main entrée with today’s long-expected announcement of the Siri assistant  Well over an hour into an event that trod over some well-covered ground from the Mac to the iPod Touch, the audience got its look at Siri on the new iPhone 4S.

By now you’ve heard the rumors and the reality: Apple’s acquisition of Siri a couple of years ago has worked itself into the latest iPhone as a voice-activated “humble personal assistant” which can do everything at your voice request, from pulling up the article on Wikipedia about Neil Armstrong to calculating the number of days until Christmas to telling you what time it is in Paris to reminding you to call your spouse before you leave work to text-messaging a lunch appointment request to the person you’ve defined in the message, without having to confirm the recipient before transmission.

Its natural language expertise and other semantic underpinnings, and some help from functionality like GPS, also mean that it knows to provide you with a map and route when you ask how to get home, or know that you want to see things like the NASDAQ composite when you ask how NASDAQ is doing today.

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A new article reports, “Perhaps the biggest announcement at Apple’s iPhone event (about one hour from this posting) will be Assistant, Apple’s evolution of the Siri Personal Assistant Software. Siri, you’ll remember, is the company Apple picked up for a rumored $200 million in April of last year for, in Steve Jobs’ words, its “Artificial Intelligence”, not search or speech recognition.”

Before Apple bought the company, Siri described itself as a Virtual Personal Assistant Read more

A few short years ago, a group of semantic technology companies rode a wave of venture capital and inflated expectation. They were going to change the world. They were going to bring semantic technologies to the mainstream. They were going to make people very rich. They were the must-have keynotes of the conference circuit. And then, one by one, they disappeared. Powerset vanished inside Microsoft, to do something for Bing. Twine vanished inside Evri, amid rumours of a fire sale and investors covering their backs. Freebase vanished inside Google, and bits of Freebase DNA routinely pop up across Google’s sprawling empire. And Siri vanished inside Apple, as we scrambled to understand whether the Cupertino money machine was after semantic smarts or ‘just’ speech recognition technology. Now, though, the rumours suggest that Siri may be back, and that it’s going to be the thing that makes the next iPhone a compelling buy. Read more

The Semantic Web Blog mentioned here, there is speculation that the Siri intelligent personal digital assistant technology may come to light in Apple’s fall iOS 5 release. Which is all well and good for users on Apple’s mobile platforms, but myBantu founder and vice president of products and strategy Bharath Yadla sees an opportunity to bring personalized recommendations for entertainment to a wider swath of the populace. The iPhone and Android version of its application, to join its web and Facebook applications. officially launch next week.

“We see absolutely a great opportunity with other platforms from a mobile standpoint,” he says. “And when you leverage the application on Facebook, that is a predominant presence.”

What users are leveraging in this intelligent assistant is its ActiveRelevance platform for providing relevant and personalized recommendations based on their profiles and queries. The platform leverages both artificial intelligence and social relevance, assessing some nine dimensions, including personal interests, proximity of choices, popularity, and peer influence, in order to deliver a handful or two of results. The social relevance comes by way of crowd-sourcing recommendations from sites such as OpenTable and Rotton Tomatoes, friends on social networking platforms, and the output of search as well as semantic engines. Users can enter their requirements in natural language, such as top romantic restaurant nearby, for the ActiveRelevance engine to parse intent and come to some conclusions.

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If the future of web content is mobile, so too then goes the future of advertising. Mobile ad network Mobile Theory and ad technology company NetSeer want to be there for that future.

The two have teamed up with the goal of mobilizing NetSeer’s concept-based advertising, which uses algorithms to pinpoint relevant and related concepts based on the subject matter in a particular article, in the service of contextual ad delivery. On a mobile site for investing, NetSeer’s ConceptLinks might display related topics like “Exchange Traded Funds” and “Portfolio Management,” which are monetized links for the publisher, the company says. NetSeer says it already has several hundred publishers using its platform on the web.

Mobile Theory does the work of making an ad unit appear and function properly in a mobile environment. CEO Scott Swanson says that takes some work. On mobile platforms smaller, screen sizes, different screen ratios, ability for users to change orientations, and those users’ desire not to click on an ad and land somewhere else all must be considered. “We had to develop an ad unit that works completely different in mobile, to be faster, more simple, and more immediate than we do in online,” he says.

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Recently the Semantic Web Blog let readers know about the IntelliVocab app from Faqden Labs. The semantics-infused app for the Android, iPhone and iPad, is aimed at helping students prepare for vocabulary sections of SAT, GRE and GMAT tests.

Photo courtesy: Flickr/Carnaval King 08

The company now is aiming to re-purpose the data-meaning and

Photo courtesy: Flickr/Alex France

collaborative interaction principles behind the technology to address needs at opposite ends of the spectrum: The grammar-school set and job-seekers. “Fundamentally from our perspective our technique is not to use core semantics like RDF triples and all, but we are building products based on the essence of the Semantic Web,” says founder Irfan Mohammed. “That is, to have meaning to the data so you can personalize the experience.”

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Nuance Communications has released Dragon Go!, a “revolutionary and free application for iPhone and iPod touch that gives consumers immediate, direct access to the mobile content they want. Dragon Go! marks a generational leap in the mobile content experience to pick up where search leaves off. Not only does Dragon Go! hear what people are searching for, but it understands what they want, giving them direct access to relevant results from 180 of the most trusted and reliable content providers, including AccuWeather, Bing, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, iTunes, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora ® internet radio, Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, YouTube, Yahoo! and many others – with the list of content providers growing each day.” Read more

Agile Tortoise has announced the launch of term.ly, a “new online dictionary and thesaurus site designed to make it easy for writers, students, educators or anyone who cares about words to find and share definitions on the web. term.ly is an online companion for Agile Tortoise’s high-successful iPad and iPhone reference app, Terminology. Terminology has ranked #1 in the reference category, as high as #25 overall on the iTunes App store and been featured by Apple numerous times since its launch in July, 2010. Built on the same semantic reference database, term.ly provides clear, concise definitions and related
words that allow you to browse the English language through more and less specific terms to find just the right word.” Read more

A recent article reports that WebLib, “a company specializing in search technologies and natural language processing tools, has released new versions of its consumer health search engine HealthMash for users of iPhone and Android mobile phones. These free applications allow users to find relevant health information from a wide variety of trusted medical sources. The apps work as full-scale, portable versions of the HealthMash website.” Read more

Semantic discovery engine Evri continues is about to put another stake in the mobile arena. It began its major push into the mobile space last year, focusing particularly on connecting consumers to vertical topic content such as tech news, baseball, football and celebrity gossip on the iPhone and Android platforms. The next big launch? Evri for the iPad.

By month’s end Evri expects to have available a private beta version, primarily for journalists and bloggers to try, with an App Store entry to follow shortly thereafter. It will be a content discovery app that, like its web site, finds trending and popular news stories on the web, distills that into topical content streams that users can browse through, and also follow favorite streams based on personalized interests.

“We’ll proactively push all new content we find around the topics you are interested in to your iPad,” says CEO Will Hunsinger. “Much like our current platform we are able to understand each individual piece of content and structured data associated with it and make recommendations of additional content, topics, news streams, or people, places and things you might be interested in based on the entities you extract in the context of articles. We become the discovery and recommendation engine in this format.”

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