Frederic Lardoinois of Tech Crunch reports, “Maluuba, the Waterloo, Canada-based Siri competitor and TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Battlefield finalist, today announced that it has added two new features to its voice-powered personal assistant app for Android and Windows Phone: sports and TV schedules. With this, Maluuba users in the U.S. and Canada can now ask it for near real-time sports results and query the service for TV listings in their area by name, genre or channel. One aspect of the service the Maluuba team has always been proud of is the fact that it has managed to add additional domains to the service quickly. The service started out with 18 domains, including restaurants, movies and general knowledge queries, but the team has continued to expand the range of topics it can handle since then. It has also rapidly expanded internationally since its launch and launched its Windows Phone 8 app earlier this year, too.” Read more

Sherpa, the number one virtual personal assistant for the Spanish speaking world, is now available in beta for the U.S. market. Starting today, Android smartphone users will be able to enjoy the platform’s many features – including searching for information, completing transactions, managing schedules and operating the device itself.

Sherpa arrives to the U.S. market with a broader knowledge base and more proactive and predictive capabilities than current market offerings and includes transactional capabilities that are unique in the virtual personal assistant category. Read more

Rado Kotorov of Venture Beat reports, “Many people delegate more and more to Siri (the electronic genie ‘in’ the iPhone) – from dialing phone numbers and finding directions, to taking dictation for SMS and emails. What if Siri could help us modulate the emotional tone of our messages? Would it make the world a better place with less conflict and argument, or would it leave piles of unread messages? Perhaps, but to be able to help in this aspect Siri will have to learn to do sentiment analysis: read text and determine its emotional charge.” Read more

Anthony Ha of Tech Crunch reports, “Sherpa, a personal assistant app that launched initially in the Spanish-speaking world, just announced that it has raised $1.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors. Sherpa users can speak or type their requests, and the app answers them by collecting information from around the web. The company has also partnered with PayPal and other services, so that users accomplish tasks like making travel reservations and transferring money.”

Ha continues, “The technology was developed by founder and CEO Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria. He actually stopped by the TechCrunch office last fall to show off the app and to compare the results to what you would find in Siri and in Wolfram Alpha. There were, in fact, a number of cases where he’d asked some factual questions and get more complete and relevant answers from Sherpa than the competition. (To be clear, that was a pretty limited test. Read more

Ron Callari of InventorSpot recently discussed the history of Siri and the rise of virtual personal assistants. He writes, “Back in May, 2009, I wrote about the first iteration of Siri, titled: Siri, Advice from Virtual Personal Assistants. For those who haven’t followed the iPhone evolution, while Siri was first integrated into iPhone’s operating system with their ’4S’ launch, it existed as stand-alone app previously. Fueled by artificial intelligence, it was a harbinger of what was to come in the new age of Web 3.0 and semantic technology… Siri prior to being acquired by Apple was the largest ‘artificial intelligence’ project in the U.S. at its time. Made possible by a $150 million DARPA investment, the project included 25 research organizations and institutions and spanned 5 years.”

He goes on, “Back then, according Bianca Bosker of the Huffington Post, ‘Siri boasted an even more irreverent tone — and a more robust set of skills.’ Read more

Ed Hayward of Boston College reports, “Say au revoir to the concierge. The proliferation of technology focused on finding the best tickets, the hottest restaurants or the next flight out of town may mean it’s time to bid adieu to the concierge and other traditional service information gatekeepers, according to new research. Face-to-face interactions with front desk clerks and concierges are not essential for personalized service, and increasingly these encounters are being substituted with Smartphone apps and other automated service systems, according to a study in the current edition of the Journal of Service Research. Business travelers who frequent the same hotels time and again may develop personal relationships with certain concierges over time, but a ‘smart digital assistant’ app can provide consistent personalized recommendations for every customer, every time, no matter where they are, the researchers report.” Read more

According to a new release out of the company, “Nuance Communications, Inc. today announced financial results for its first quarter fiscal 2013, ended December 31, 2012. Nuance reported GAAP revenue of $462.3 million in the first quarter fiscal 2013, a 28.2% increase over GAAP revenue of $360.6 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2012. Nuance reported non-GAAP revenue of $492.4 million, which includes $30.1 million in revenue lost to accounting treatment in conjunction with acquisitions. First quarter fiscal 2013 non-GAAP revenue grew 28.9% over non-GAAP revenue of $382.0 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2012.” Read more

The Huffington Post recently shared an inside look at the origins of Siri. The article states, “The world got its first inkling of the quick wit that would make Apple’s Siri an icon during a packed press conference held before an auditorium of tech elite. ‘Who are you?’ an Apple executive asked the assistant. ‘I am a humble personal assistant,’ Siri answered to appreciative laughter. More like humbled personal assistant. That press conference was actually Siri’s second coming-out party. When the virtual assistant first launched in early 2010, it was a standalone iPhone app called Siri created by a 24-person startup with the same name, a company Apple would later acquire.” Read more

Ken Yeung of The Next Web reports, “People are getting busier by the day and often turn to technology to help them find smarter ways to be more productive. A consequence of this is that things get left behind or undone and then need to be taken care of. To a certain degree, Siri, Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant, was supposed to accomplish this. However, some say that it hasn’t done a good enough job and opens the door for other solutions. Today, Sivi launches to try and be the service that everyone needs.” Read more

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