No, you don't get it. I never claimed that Siri was "magic", nor does anyone besides the most lay of users. I'll easily concede that they're both based on very similar technologies - oh wait, if you actually read my original post, I already did.

The user-facing implementations are remarkably different - and the extension that Siri made to the original concept (that Apple then acquired) are both novel and innovative - something you seem rather happy to dismiss as mere "marketing".

> "Basically google search does the same. What's the difference? The marketing."

Can Google Voice Search respond to "wake me up for my morning meeting"? Or "add a dentist appointment tomorrow at 3?". That is the novel part of Siri, not the voice recognition part - which as you correctly point out was already a solved problem. The novel bit was taking this gooey, nice NLP stuff that we have now, and plugging it into places where traditionally horrible voice control software has been (or places where the shittiness of voice control prevented a real implementation).

But of course, if it's not algorithmically innovative, it's not innovative, period, right?

> "Wow, right? Alphas UNDERSTANDS you! It's awesome, buy it! But:"

Why are you stuck on this? I never claimed Siri "understands" you, nor does anyone on HN. We know it's a probabilistic solution...

> "The first one is just faster to execute (type or say). Only with the second example you can go all crazy and tell people that you reinvented the whole business."

Ah yes, another "engineer" moment. Because we know users are just dying to say fewer words to their device. Oh drats, if only there was a way to shave fractions of a second off voice dictation! I will gladly interrupt my natural mode of sentence synthesis in exchange for an abrupt series of disconnected keywords!

If you look at Google's search logs, you will see that a large segment of the population are still typing full sentences into search engines, despite the fact that it probably worsens their results. This is how "normal" people approach technology, and this is how normal people compose thoughts and sentences.

How dare Apple! How dare they make technology wrap around people's default mode of thinking instead of forcing them to adapt to the input mode that's optimal for the underlying technology! The nerve!

This is why Apple succeeds, and this is why the seemingly infinite horde of Apple-haters don't get it. All of the cool algorithms in the world won't save you from bad usability, or incorrectly exposing your interface to users. Siri took a technology that already existed and extended it into a space that nobody was in at the time - one that users find very compelling, and in some ways solved a problem users didn't know they had. To then turn around and blithely and smugly dismiss this as mere "marketing" is absurd, especially if your only support is that it's "built on the same technology". Need I remind you that we had touch screens for years before the iPhone rolled around, and that we were building PCs long before Windows hit the market. Yet the effect of those two products on the market has been undeniable - even though both were just extensions from existing ideas.