I think there will be some cool applications with this and a Rasberry PI. I'm floating around this half-baked idea of plugging Rasberry PI's into the light sockets of my home (since they're all central to the room [better for audio and microphone quality] and negates the need of running wire all over the place) so that I can have voice controlled computers in all my rooms and play music/make calls/automate my home/etc. Being able to ask the computer some random question and get an answer without having to go to my computer would be insanely cool to me :)
Hmmm, on Mac, might be possible to simplify using system's dictation (have no idea if they have API for that, probably no, but maybe there is a way to hack it) and system's voice. So then it might be even faster, and would require mostly just Wolfram|Alpha API key.
The future is an API mashup. Neat. It does make me wince a bit thinking that the actual techniques driving all of this are locked up tight, and subject to going away whenever the owning business decides to do so. Hopefully the <i>actual</i> future is a little more open.
Neat. I'm working on a system and API for question type (factoid, polar, description, etc.) prediction and polar question answering (polar questions are 'yes-or-no' questions; Wolfram Alpha doesn't attempt these). Let me know if you are interested.
It is Siri minus a lot of the language processing. I'm glad to see interest in the topic since this is the type of thing I am currently working on a <a href="http://www.stremor.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.stremor.com</a><p>But Wolfram alpha has a lot of things missing, and lots of the things it does are way longer than I want to hear a computer read to me.<p>Maybe if the author combined this with our TLDR api, and our Sentence parsring API, and our Fact search API...<p>(yes if you use all of our API's you can build this in about and hour and have it do a lot more) <i>hint</i> <i>hint</i>