Siri, Apple's awesome voice assistant is more than enough reason to go out and buy an iPhone 4S (if you can get one). With hints that the Apple TV will get a hardware update — and that fast dual-core A5 processor, it's possible Siri might make the little black box less of a "hobby" and put the "smart" back in Smart TV.
It's a fantasy every tech fan has long dreamed of: voice controlling your TV. The TV remote's over 50 years old and we haven't gotten any less lazy.
Why bother with fiddly remotes with zillions of buttons, when we can just order our TVs to go to ESPN, Cartoon Network, increase/decrease volume, etc.?
Kinect's voice control function is a step in the right direction, but it's still a far cry from being super responsive (our own Kevin Hall says Kinect never seems to understand him). Apple's Siri technology seems pretty robust (we've yet to test it ourselves), but judging from the response and questions the press have tossed its way, the voice recognition and intelligent A.I. seem like technologies from the future.
Siri in the AppleTV would give it a life of its own. A TV would no longer be a box that just pipes stuff through you. You'd be able to talk to your TV. And it'd talk back.
Having Siri in an Apple TV attached to an HDTV would be like having a personal assistant inside the living room. The possibilities could be endless. I could ask Siri to recommend a movie, to pull up the weather, to give me a recipe on how to cook a meal, to do almost anything.
With so much of more time spent watching videos on the Web than on TV, if Apple incorporates Siri into its Apple TV, it has a real chance at pushing us all back in front of the tube again.
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