[IanMikutel]

Thanks for the analysis on my analysis. :)

I can definitely see why you'd think this could go the way of Facetime, but its completely different. Why? Because while Facetime seemed to solve a problem we all wanted solved, in reality its simply not practical to video call someone with a mobile phone a lot of the time. If I'm on the go, walking a city or driving in the suburbs, Facetime is a terrible idea.

Assistant is exactly the opposite. It's almost essential in those situations and extremely practical. I can pretty much see Oprah endorsing this feature alone in her anti-texting-while-driving campaign now.

And YOU get an iPhone Assistant, and YOU get an iPhone Assistant...

[cheald]

The voice recognition on my Android phone is marvelously useful while driving; I hold my search button, say "navigate to Schlotzsky's", and it pops up a map, finds the nearest Schlotzsky's, plots directions to it, and I'm off. No hunt-and-pecking on a keyboard without tactile feedback, no navigating through twelve menus or trying to remember how to spell "Schlotzsky's". It's an awesome feature, and it's something that the iPhone needs to at least match.

What's Apple going to do beyond that, though? They can't build a keynote on "Hey, now we have this feature that our competitor has". It has to be something bigger and better. Android exposes speech input backed by Google's unfathomable processing power and recognition dataset to every application that wants to use it; what can Apple put on a phone that will be significant enough to not be a "me too"?