There are two other properties of Siri, which are special: using knowledge and using context. You have no longer talk some isolated commands like "Radio" "on". You can talk like you would do with a person - a beginner or child - but a person. And to the second, this "person" has knowledge and context awareness. By using data from location services, database, documents etc. it is possible to provide interpretation of what the user said. It is a first step in a much bigger world, the artificial understanding. When speech recognition is our planet, than artificial understanding is like offering the milky way to us.
For me its not the matter if Siri work exactly like described above or if there are many problems with it. It is the start of a new way to work with artificial intelligence. It is a hypotheses of mine that the universe works probabilistic. I belief that the physics we use today - with solutions of algebraic equations - is just the recognition of an average or of limits. In Quantum Theory and statistical thermodynamics the probabilistic nature is directly observable. And my strong belief is that the brain is - as far it relates to knowledge processing and control - and statistic engine, were one brick of it is association and pattern recognition.
Collecting and correlating knowledge pieces - which we can call documents - and building knowledge from it is the thing which really impresses me on the IBM Watson project. And for this judgement, it is irrelevant that Watson is built on brute force and a collection or hand-made optimizations for special problems. We come closer to a theory describing this all with time.
The important thing is this: Siri (I think) and Watson are knowledge processors in the sense above, and move our view to the probabilistic nature of the universe, also shifting our paradigm what computers can be good for, maybe even the paradigm how to use this huge knowledge and database called Internet.
This is like all things begin: small and decent ;)
