Google planning competitor to Apple's Siri voice assistant

Siri, Apple’s much touted and talked about voice assistant may soon have a competitor! The ‘voice’ of the iPhone 4s could be upstaged by Google, who are reportedly in the final stages of developing their own voice assistant for Android. [caption id=“attachment_233831” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Siri is one of the most talked about features of the iPhone 4s: Reuters”]  [/caption] Techcrunch, which first reported the news, said that the new assistant would be simply called “Google Assistant”. The report adds, “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. What this could mean, according to a report in Venture Beat, is that it “will be able to tap Google’s powerful search engine for knowledge and integrate Google services like Gmail, Google+, and YouTube, making it easier than ever to do anything on your phone.” The Techcrunch report adds that unlike Siri, Google will open Assistant’s API to developers so they can incorporate it into apps and websites that they develop for the Android marketplace. And Venture Beat gives the entire story more credence by saying, “Further adding fuel to this rumor fire, Google applied for a patent that sounded quite a bit like Siri a few weeks ago.”