Well - a good test would be for someone to survey the population today, see what percentage of them are happy with their voice activated personal assistants, then do so a year, two, five from now and see how the numbers change.

The challenging part, as always will be to understand what percentage of this technology would have been deployed regardless of what Apple did, and whether it would have been deployed with the same attention to detail and quality.

I understand that Droid's are already somewhat voice controlled. Will be interested to see how Apple's implementation compares with that, and the Windows Phone 7 voice control. Anybody have a droid and windows phone 7 that would like to comment on how well it's implemented on those platforms?

I wager that the difference between Apple's implementation and others will be as vast as the difference between an iPhone and a Nokia Communicator.

As far as I know, Siri doesn't have hard-coded voice commands, like 'SEND TEXT TO PAUL' articulated in a robotic voice. It aims to understands natural language with infinite variations.

One of the examples was: 'Do I need a raincoat today?' and you can continue 'How about tomorrow?' or 'where can I buy one?', and Siri understands the context. This is far far more advanced than any 'voice control' there is, and gives just a glimpse of what's coming.

Considering that Siri has been available on the App Store for a while, and no one really cared, I doubt it.

The key point here is integration though. Just putting a speech recognition app on a phone isn't doing much. But making sure the most common cases you are going to be using it for, e.g. appointments/reminders, searching for specific things, finding a nearby hotel etc. work reliably no matter in what way you phrase it, is the part that makes it really useful. Also consider how you can make sure this works as expected by using all the context available onm a modern smartphone (location/movement, weather, calendar, emergency information, congestion) If Apple does the polishing work for that to work it will be a huge success. They probably aren't there yet though, otherwise their presentation would have put much more emphasis on it.

I tested the current state of voice recognition on Android and was mostly disappointed (bad recognition, and nowhere the "intelligence" you would expect).

The point is, you could already integrate with Maps/Calendar/Address Book etc from the app.

Yes, the integrated Siri is going to be better, but is it going to blow your mind and revolutionise the world? No. Get back to me when it can understand a non-Germanic language.

Siri in app-form was a very different thing, far less capable.

Implementation is key.

Tablets were a disaster before iPad. Smartphones were ridiculous prior to iPhone. Siri will have the same effect on A.I.

I'm all about the iPad and iPhone, but Siri is not going to achieve that sort of success for a lot of reasons. Just wait and see. :)