What might a voice-activated collaboration client do? Siri’s current ability to make calendar entries, send text messages, and take dictation hint at the possibilities. مثلا, the standard way of sharing comments is Facebook’s wall metaphor–a comment stream threaded beneath an anchor topic. In the context of enterprise collaboration, the topic is likely to be a PowerPoint deck or meeting agenda. While it’s possible, although rarely pleasant, to read heavily formatted content like a slide deck on a smartphone, typing a comment is onerous, even with a client optimized for the smartphone’s small display. Wouldn’t it be nice to dictate your thoughts instead?

بالطبع, this text-to-speech example just hints at what innovative developers might do with a cloud-based speech-recognition engine. Siri already understands context, in that prior requests inform subsequent answers. Ask “Find me the nearest Mexican restaurant,” and Siri replies with a list based on your current location. Follow up with “في, make that pizza,” and Siri remembers both the context (restaurants) and location. Imagine if this same logical power could be applied to any application. Say you’re a sales rep and your manager has shared a spreadsheet with regional sales estimates. If you have updated figures for your territory, instead of hunting and pecking changes on the tiny touchscreen keyboard, wouldn’t it be nice to say, “Siri, change the sales estimate for the Northwest region from 750,000 to 900,000″ and have the update applied, along with a comment field indicating who made the change? وبالمثل, when reviewing a project manager’s task schedule on the road from your phone, wouldn’t it be nice to update it with a simple voice command? “Siri, change the completion date for software pilot testing to Feb. 9.”

Natural-language control of computer systems is not new; it’s been a staple of science fiction since Star Trek. But Siri, with its merging of client-side language processing and server-side meaning interpretation, has raised the bar on what’s possible. While talking to a laptop, with its expansive keyboard, never made much sense, talking to your phone couldn’t be more natural. Instead of having conversations with friends or colleagues, let’s just have a conversation with the device itself. Siri ushers in the era in which speech recognition doesn’t let devices just take dictation but actually engage in conversation–tell it what we want, react to the response, and modify our request–and use speech as a software UI.

The future of smartphone collaboration lies in vocal, not tactile, interaction. Siri blazes the trail.

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