A few months ago I told you that Google is working on the development of a competitor for Siri called Majel. The project from Google is announced to be an extremely interesting one, according to its developers, because the final result should be better than Siri from many points of view. Google He's focusing on the development of a system that is not focused on providing search results, but is focused on providing all important information in a format recognized by a computer and, perhaps most importantly, is focused on providing the necessary APIs to develop applications to work with it.
Well our friends over in Mountain View, never ones to miss out on an opportunity to compete, have come up with their own answer to Siri, Google 'Assistant' (earlier reports had it pegged as 'Majel,' I have no idea whether that name was scrapped but do know that 'Assistant' is not a part of GoogleX as Majel was). Google has had the in-house voice technology for ages — it hired Mike Cohen, the guy who started Nuance. But 'Assistant' is set to go beyond Siri in many ways, most importantly in that the search company will retain complete control of all the layers involved.
Google was completely taken by surprise by Siri and now it is trying to catch up with Apple, but I hope that everything presented to us now as "rumors" turns out to be true because usually the products that are discussed a lot and are presented as great ones turn out to be just the opposite. Google aims to launch Google "Assistant" in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2012, but the date is not certain, so Android 5.0 could come without it.
