iPhone 4S Ad Hits TV & YouTube, Focuses on Siri Assistant

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Apple has a new iPhone 4S commercial which already aired on TV and it is also available either on Apple’s website or on the company’s YouTube channel. The new ad focuses on the main feature the iPhone 4S bring to the table, the Siri intelligent assistant.

Entitled simply “Assistant,” the 30-second clip below shows various questions Siri can be asked during regular every-day use and Apple insists on the fact that anyone can use the new app in a bunch of scenarios, and then some. Apple encourages users to “say hello to the most amazing iPhone yet,” which is a new punch-line the company has appropriately chosen for this new feature.

As far as I’m concerned, Siri is the “one more thing” that Steve Jobs would have introduced had he hosted the iPhone 4S keynote. Siri is an app that differentiates the iPhone 4S from the pack of other iOS devices. Various hackers are already trying to port the application to the iPhone 4 or iPad 2 but in the mean time Siri remains an exclusive iPhone 4S feature.

Sure, it’s not all good news for Apple when it comes to Siri. Plenty of users reported Siri connectivity issues in the days following the iPhone 4S launch and the app may pose a minor, but preventable security risk to the iPhone, but the app is certainly impressive, even if it’s still a beta version.

Other mobile operating systems have various voice-based apps, with the most recent example being Iris, a Siri-like assistant for Android that was recently unveiled. But Siri is a native Apple app, integrated in iOS 5, at least for the iPhone 4S, and it may take a while until other OEMs decide to build their own cloud-based virtual assistant.

Andy Rubin, the head of Google’s Android, has made it pretty clear that Siri is an unnecessary feature of a phone, but what else could he say from that position, especially as Siri may put a dent in Google’s mobile search earnings. It will be interesting to see whether Google will launch its own Siri-like advanced voice-based assistant for mobile devices in the near future. We’ll all want to hear what Rubin will have to say then, because voice assistants are only going to get smarter and smarter in the following years and I think it’s safe to assume they’ll be integrated in plenty of other computers, not just the mobile ones.

Are you using Siri yet? Are you buying an iPhone 4S to specifically use Siri?