Google doesn’t seem to have the intention of being in second place in anything. Now that Apple (News 
- Alert) is starting to ramp up on its success with Siri, Google wants a piece of the pie. This week, Google bought Clever Sense, an application development company that developed “Alfred.”
The “Alfred” application allows you to see local areas within your vicinity using the GPS attached to your phone. This “local browsing” application claims to be “the Pandora (News - Alert) for the real world.” Lately, Google’s been acquiring different companies in an attempt to make a move against Apple and keep its place as a local area authority on the web.
Currently, Google (News - Alert) has products like Google Maps and Google Earth, which show all sorts of local places of interest to users who inquire even from within the search engine. Siri, however, is taking Google’s place as the number one “places of interest” application in mobile environments. This, of course, makes Google throw tantrums and tons of money at the issue. Alfred acts much like Siri, retrieving information about places of interest in your vicinity by searching the web. It’s even voice-activated.
Other rumors coming from websites like Mashable speculate that Google is working on an application that will throw Siri into darkness, codenamed “Majel.” As far as we know, though, information like this should be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s more like “he said/she said” intelligence. AndroidAndMe also confirms the “Majel” theory, saying that Google has been working on a platform for voice recognition similar to Siri that allows for natural speech. This essentially means that you don’t have to talk to your phone like a machine. Instead, you can talk to it like you would to another person and the application would understand your instructions. Siri already does this; why can’t “Majel?”
Miguel Leiva-Gomez is a professional writer with experience in computer sciences, technology, and gadgets. He has written for multiple technology and travel outlets and owns his own tech blog called The Tech Guy, where he writes educational, informative, and sometimes comedic articles for an audience that is less versed in technology.Edited by
Rich Steeves
