Ryan Kim of GigaOM recently reported that SRI International is putting out their own Siri-like personal travel assistant, Desti. He writes, “Apple’s Siri works pretty well as a personal assistant but it’s not equipped to be your virtual travel guide. But Desti which, like Siri, is a spin out from SRI International, is launching today in public beta and is looking to take on that job for consumers. Desti, which is debuting as an iPad app, offers users the ability to pose travel questions and get back specific recommendations on hotels, restaurants and events. The service, which is limited to Northern California for now, was built using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology, combined with natural language processing, semantic search and a travel-specific knowledge base. The system uses contextual clues and what it knows about a user to return relevant results, which are displayed on a very visual results page.” Read more

Tom Simonite of the Technology Review reports, “Personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri may be useful, but they are still far from matching the smarts and conversational skills of a real person. Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated a new, potentially better approach that creates a smart artificial chat partner from fleeting contributions from many crowdsourced workers.” Read more

There remained some questions last week about whether or not Apple’s new iOS 5 operating system will bundle the semantically-enriched Siri personal assistant with it.

Looks like that’s a no. According to 9to5Mac, for now Siri remains exclusive to the iPhone 4S (see our coverage here ). It is possible to update existing Apple devices to iOS 5, but seems those updates won’t include the voice-enabled app.

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We are beginning to see a new interaction paradigm for the web: the Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA). A VPA is task focused: it helps you get things done. You interact with it in natural language, in a conversation. It gets to know you, acts on your behalf, and gets better with time. The VPA paradigm builds on the information and services of the web, with new technical challenges of semantic intent understanding, context awareness, service delegation, and mass personalization.

Siri is a virtual personal assistant for the mobile Internet. Although just in its infancy, Siri can help with some common tasks that human assistants do, such as booking a restaurant, getting tickets to a show, and inviting a friend. We will describe the technology underlying Siri and how it fits in the larger ecosystem of services and data providers. And we will offer a vision of where assistants like Siri are going.

KEYNOTE: The Game Changer: Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.

We are beginning to see a new interaction paradigm for the web: the Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA). A VPA is task focused: it helps you get things done. You interact with it in natural language, in a conversation. It gets to know you, acts on your behalf, and gets better with time. The VPA paradigm builds on the information and services of the web, with new technical challenges of semantic intent understanding, context awareness, service delegation, and mass personalization.

Siri is a virtual personal assistant for the mobile Internet. Although just in its infancy, Siri can help with some common tasks that human assistants do, such as booking a restaurant, getting tickets to a show, and inviting a friend. We will describe the technology underlying Siri and how it fits in the larger ecosystem of services and data providers. And we will offer a vision of where assistants like Siri are going.

KEYNOTE: The Game Changer: Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.