John Lawlor

I read this very interesting review of Siri Assistant on Mashable, one of my favourite Social Media guides and review sites. Siri Assistant is a personal assistant on your iPhone and can help you find restaurants, movies, etc; book taxis; discover events in your area, and much more. It uses voice recognition technology to interpret your commands and turn them into intelligent web searches and services. It can find services based on your location and also uses the context of your current search to bring you other relevant information. If you have already subscribed to services that Siri partners with, it can use your credentials with those services to offer you tailored solutions. It looks very impressive indeed.

I really like my iPhone and was very anxious to download the application. However, I was disappointed to discover that the application is not yet available in the Irish App store.

It appears that it is not available in other App Stores either, including Australia and Canada, so at this stage it must only be available in the USA. I tried to open an account in the USA store but needed a credit card with a USA billing address. Since I didn’t have one, I was brought back to the Irish App Store – back to square one!

Siri Assistant works with over 30 partners in the USA and I expect that this is the reason that it has not been rolled out in other countries yet, while parter agreements are being put in place. With the Irish market being so small, I wonder when we will see applications like this available here.

The application looks very powerful and here is a short Youtube video that demonstrates its features.

If anyone knows how to get the App for an iPhone in Ireland, I’d appreciate your help. Or if you know of other similar applications, why not leave a comment and let me know.