Rumor: Google May Launch a Siri Rival Very Soon

Siri - Apple's intelligent personal assistant feature is one of the hottest smartphone features of 2011 and though competition have publicly stated that they're not worried about the feature as they already offer similar features, not surprisingly it looks like companies like Google are taking the threat very seriously.

As MacRumors points out one of key differentiators of Siri, is it's natural language processing capabilities, which gives it an edge over other simple voice recognition systems. So even though Android based smartphones offer Voice Actions and Windows Phone 7 based smartphones come with TellMe before Siri was released, they haven't been as popular as Siri.

However, it looks like Googlers are working hard to launch a Siri rival soon, according to  

AndroidandMe.

AndroidandMe reports:

over the last couple weeks I received further details about the secret project. For starters it is codenamed Majel, which comes from Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, better known as the voice of the Federation Computer from Star Trek.

Majel is an evolution of Google’s Voice Actions that is currently available on most Android phones with the addition of natural language processing. Where Voice Actions required you to issue specific commands like “send text to…” or “navigate to…”, Majel will allow you to perform actions in your natural language similar to how Siri functions.

MacRumors points to a SlashGear interview with Matias Duarte, Google's Director of Android OS 

User Experience, where he provides some insight into what to expect:

The metaphor I like to take is – if it’s Star Wars, you have these robot personalities like C-3PO who runs around and he tries to do stuff for you, messes up and makes jokes, he’s kind of a comic relief guy. Our approach is more like Star Trek, right, starship Enterprise; every piece of computing surface, everything is voice-aware. It’s not that there’s a personality, it doesn’t have a name, it’s just “Computer.” And you can talk to it and you can touch it, you can interact with it at the same time as you talk with it. It’s just another way to interface with the computer.

It will be interesting to checkout Google's Siri rival. In the meantime, we hope that it will put pressure on Apple to add more functionality to Siri and also release an API for Siri, so that third party developers can use it.

It will also be interesting to see if Google will launch the feature across all smartphones or like Apple it will be available only with the latest device. If Google releases it for all Android based smartphones then Apple may be forced into releasing Siri non-iPhone 4S devices. What do you think? Sound off in the comments!