Apple has recently acquired Siri, a company that makes a virtual assistant app.  Siri was inspired by Darpa’s CALO – the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes – project.  While Siri was initially designed to help streamline military personnel’s activities the consumer app now focuses on helping your find things like restaurants, hotels, businesses and even utilizes speech recognition tools.  This app is essentially a smart search app and has people speculating about the direction that Apple might be taking.  Many industry experts feel that this acquisition is leading Apple into Google territory.

While the terms of the acquisition are not known Business Insider guesses the deal could be worth $100 to $200 million.  A deal of that magnitude would definitely signal a commitment to this new type of technology for Apple.  The technology that Siri can bring to the table for Apple’s various consumer electronics will certainly enhance the user experience of iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad users.

This recent announcement is one of the more exciting announcements to come from the mobile device world this week.  It certainly does appear that Apple is looking to make a leap into the mobile app department and this acquisition of the start up company Siri will certainly go a long way in making that a successful transition.  With the technology Siri has created Apple will be able to add a lot of cool search features into various apps and make their mobile devices truly GPS user friendly.  It will be very handy if you were able to speak into your iPhone and ask your personal assistant app where the nearest coffee shop was and quickly receive directions to several different options that you can walk to.

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