Siri

Apple has hired William Stasior, an Amazon executive, to run the Siri unit. At Amazon, Stasior ran the group responsible for Amazon’s search and search advertising efforts, known as A9, and has previously worked at Oracle, Netcentives, and AltaVista. Given Stasior’s experience in search, there are a number of reasons that he could have been brought on.

The new iPod touch devices announced today at Apple's event will be able to run Siri. The voice-activated virtual assistant has been gradually creeping its way into Apple's other products, and it's good to see it landing on the iPhone's little brother. All of the usual tasks, like launching into web searches, controlling music, opening apps, and checking the weather and sports scores are included. 

With iOS 6, Apple is replacing the previous, Google-powered Maps app on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, with a completely redesigned, re-rendered, and re-imagined Maps app. The data itself is supplied by TomTom, but Apple has draw all the maps, and while they've lost some features, like Street View, they're adding new ones, like turn-by-turn navigation

Rumor has it, Apple's been wanting to add turn-by-turn for a while now, but Google would only give it to them if Apple took the location-tracking Latitude feature as well. Apple declined. Now, in command of their own geo-destiny, Apple will soon be providing free navigation for one and all, and thanks to Siri on the iPhone 4S and future devices, it'll have full on voice directions as well.

Siri with iOS 5 was a decidedly iPhone 4S-only affair, with Apple choosing not to make anything more than Dictation available, even on their 2012 new iPad. That might have been due to the challenges involved in scaling Siri up from the full, albeit small iPhone interface, to the bigger iPad screen. With iOS 6, however, Apple has done it, and Siri is fully launching on the new iPad.

Since the phenomenal success of the Pebble smart watch on Kickstarter, a few other designers have seen the huge interest it generated and decided to start looking at their own ideas for a smart watch. One of those ideas has now appeared on Kickstarter and instead of a smart watch that is all about the display, this one is all about voice control from your wrist.

Siri was a bit of a tease on iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S -- while it could send Messages and Mails, it couldn't send status updates to Twitter or Facebook, and it couldn't even open an app. With iOS 6, however, Siri is not only launching on the iPad, but it's launching you into any app on your device, and posting tweets and updates like a social champ.

Another idea we've been talking around a lot, both in articles and on the iMore show and the Iterate podcast, is the future of Apple's virtual personal assistant, Siri and what it means for current graphical user interfaces. While working on the iOS 6 Siri previews, however, it began to coalesce. Watching the WWDC 2012 keynote, Apple senior vice president of iOS, Scott Forstall showed off the updates planned for Siri in iOS 6, and used an interesting turn of phrase -- "you can even tap to watch the trailer right here in Siri".

Not "using Siri". Not "with Siri". "In Siri."

Not many real-world assistants will help you find a movie to watch anymore, or look up who is in it and how well it's rated for you, not even Siri on iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S. With iOS 6, however, Siri is not only opening on the iPad, but its becoming a veritable movie buff to boot.