Key Pieces of history in the Siri vs Google Voice Search - Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project called CALO which was primarily designed to help

Key Pieces of history in the Siri vs Google Voice Search - Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project called CALO which was primarily designed to help the military handle information in the form of MS Office documents/Outlook email. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-apple-iphone_n_2499165.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-appl... - CALO was an almost 10 year project run out of SRI but executed primarily at Stanford,Berekley and the University of Washington. Many PhD's and post docs on the west coast in Machine Learning cut their teeth on some element of CALO. It's influence is pervasive throughout the Valley. - Apple does not have in-house voice recognition technology and instead licences technology from Nuance. - Nuance is essentially a holding company for all the commercial voice recognition technology from the 90's and 00's except what MSFT picked up from the TellMe acquisition and what Google developed under Mike Cohen. - Mike Cohen is a Nuance co-founder who nurtured voice recognition tech at Google for many years before leaving in 2011 but Google's current voice recognition technology is largely the result of research products he ran.(http://9to5google.com/2012/05/23/manager-of-speech-technology-mike-cohen-reportedly-leaves-google/ http://9to5google.com/2012/05/23/manager-of-speech-technolog...) To Summarize. Siri and Google Voice search share a common lineage. Google is better position to improve the technology because they are not relying an existing vendor and acquisitions for key pieces of technology but instead they have been gestating internal groups specializing in both semantics and voice to text internally for many years.