Siri is not just any Voice Recognition Application that you have used or heard about before. It’s a Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence and human like speech. We have never before come across an application that is both intelligent and can talk like a human being at the same time, even answering silly questions to perfection like, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road’.

Till now there were 3 ways to interact with devices, Keyboard, Mouse and Gestures. Siri with the power of Human Speech, the most effective way of human communication, is going to be a game changer in many fields including Smart Phones, Search and other technologies. Some day technologies like Google Search will become obsolete unless they will find some ways to get around.

With pasts as back as 1966, Siri is an outcome of work done by many different groups including DARPA, SRI International, many Universities and Apple of course. Dag Kittlaus , Siri Inc.’s former CEO and co-founder and Adam Cheyer, Siri Inc.’s former VP Engineering and co-founder are considered the two fathers of Siri which now belongs to Apple. But it was the ingenuity of Apple that brought Siri to a whole new level, making it possible to realize it’s potential and bringing it to the public by including it in iPhone 4S.

Siri is just in version 1.0 now. With Apple as it’s Godfather Siri is heading towards bright future, as a technology that will be an inevitable part of our future. Either be Artificial intelligence or Context awareness Siri would have it all and would be a synergy of what technology will have to offer us.

Here’s a list of what Siri can do till now. (Courtesy to Brian Roemmele, Alchemist & Metaphysician at Quora)

• Does Things For You- Task completion:

- Multiple Criteria Vertical and Horizontal searches
- On the fly combining of multiple information sources
- Real time editing of information based on dynamic criteria
- Integrated endpoints, like ticket purchases, etc.

• Gets What You Say- Conversational intent:

- Location context
- Time context
- Task context
- Dialog context

• Gets To Know You- Learns and acts on personal information:

- Who are your friends
- Where do you live
- What is your age
- What do you like

Computing technology has changed. Long gone are the times of 30+tons, Eniac computer. Now is the era of  Ultraportable Laptops aka ‘Ultrabooks’.

Apple started the trend of Ultrabooks with it’s range of Macbook airs. And like always it became the trend setter. But there seems to be a confusion in the web regarding whether to call Macbook Air ‘Ultrabook’ or not. It seems that ‘Ultrabook’ term was coined by Intel, yes Intel that made the legendary core i7, and it has made some criteria for the Ultrabook.

Intel’s So Called Specifications.

• Thickness – Less than 20 mms (.8 inch)
• Screen Size – Less than 13 inches
• Weight – Less than 1.4 kg (3.1 pounds)
• Battery Life – More than 5 hours
• Price – Should be under $1000 (this is the main reason for not considering Macbook Air as an Ultrabook, though the Macbook Air 11′inch falls under $1000 mark.)
• Boot time – faster than ever before, and should use Intel’s Rapid Start Technology that uses flash storage in laptop’s Motherboard. ( That means AMD based notebooks could never be Ultrabooks, and another condition not fulfilled by Macbook Air)
• Intel Sandy Bridge mobile processors that include i5 and i7 ( The second phase would have 20 nm, Ivy Bridge mobile processors set to be released on mid 2012

“Journyx technology, from the source code of our software to the code that maintains our Web site and ASP sites, is entirely based on Python. It increases our speed of development and keeps us several steps ahead of competitors while remaining easy to read and use. It’s as high level of a language as you can have without running into functionality problems. I estimate that Python makes our coders 10 times more productive than Java programmers, and 100 times more than C programmers.” — Curt Finch, CEO, Journyx

I have come up with a Python Attitude Timeline from Matt Harrison’s Blog. It is basically a sum up of what Greg Stein’s keynote included in Pycon Day3: March 25th, 2005.

Attitudes toward Python

• 1995 – eShop – What is python?
• 1996 – eShop – Python is great and making us successful
• 1997 – MS (acquired eShop) – Shipped embedded python in their product
• 1998 – MS – We are using python?  That was a “prototype”.  Let’s re-write it.  (The re-write in .asp was slower)
• 2001 – Collabnet – We don’t use python
• 2003 – Collabnet – Write that in python
• 2005 – Google – Of course we use python

Some of Python’s notable features:

• Uses an elegant syntax, making the programs you write easier to read.
• Is an easy-to-use language that makes it simple to get your program working. This makes Python ideal for prototype development and other ad-hoc programming tasks, without compromising maintainability.
• Comes with a large standard library that supports many common programming tasks such as connecting to web servers, searching text with regular expressions, reading and modifying files.
• Python’s interactive mode makes it easy to test short snippets of code. There’s also a bundled development environment called IDLE.
• Is easily extended by adding new modules implemented in a compiled language such as C or C++.
• Can also be embedded into an application to provide a programmable interface.
• Runs on many different computers and operating systems: Windows, MacOS, many brands of Unix, OS/2, …
• Is free software in two senses. It doesn’t cost anything to download or use Python, or to include it in your application. Python can also be freely modified and re-distributed, because while the language is copyrighted it’s available under an open source license.

Some programming-language features of Python are:

• A variety of basic data types are available: numbers (floating point, complex, and unlimited-length long integers), strings (both ASCII and Unicode), lists, and dictionaries.
• Python supports object-oriented programming with classes and multiple inheritance.
• Code can be grouped into modules and packages.
• The language supports raising and catching exceptions, resulting in cleaner error handling.
• Data types are strongly and dynamically typed. Mixing incompatible types (e.g. attempting to add a string and a number) causes an exception to be raised, so errors are caught sooner.
• Python contains advanced programming features such as generators and list comprehensions.
• Python’s automatic memory management frees you from having to manually allocate and free memory in your code.