03/03, 12:25pm
Google Assistant said coming by late 2012
Apparent new leaks have suggested Google is developing a very broad, multi-platform alternative to Siri. So far called Assistant, the concept TechCrunch saw would translate Google's search content into a "personalization layer" that would understand the relationships between data points. A voice-based recognition engine would, like Apple's system, focus on returning a key useful result or accomplishing a task, not just pushing a raw list of results.
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02/11, 1:40pm
Apple lawsuit vs Samsung expanded
An expansion upon what few details have been available from Apple's new Samsung lawsuit has suggested that it reaches more at the core of Android and less at Samsung's specific actions. Along with accusing Samsung of violating a newer unlock gesture patent than what was covered in Germany, a second patent for a "universal interface" for retrieving data appeared to Florian Mueller to accuse Samsung of violating Siri-style searches, where stitching together keywords presents just the immediately needed results. While Android on a base level doesn't do this, it would prevent Google from providing a narrower search method in Android.
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12/13, 6:50pm
Google may boost voice search through Majel engine
Google is building its own Android copy of the Siri voice technology from the iPhone 4S, according to one rumor Tuesday. Nicknamed Majel based on Gene Roddenberry's wife and the computer voice of many Star Trek: The Next Generation-era spaceships, the engine Android and Me was would provide natural-language search. It would initially focus only on Google searches, presumably including content like general queries and maps.
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