Chinese Companies Form Alliance to Take on Apple's Siri

When you think of mobile voice recognition technology you will likely think of Apple's Siri voice assistant, however Apple weren't the first and they are still far from being the best, in Chinese at least, and Chinese companies hope to take advantage of this.

Chinese hardware makers Lenovo and Huawei have teamed up China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom and iFlytek along with others to form the Speech Industry Alliance of China aka SAIC (not to be confused with the Chinese automotive company!).

The alliance hope to take advantage of iFlytek's speech recognition system which works extremely at understanding the various tones and dialect spoken in China to take on Apple Siri which even in iOS 6 is lacking in its Chinese understanding.

SAIC hope to pool resources to further stretch their lead over Apple and Siri's Chinese implementaion and install their own voice recognition software on Android and possibly Windows based phones for the Chinese market.

The question is though will Chinese buyers be won over by better Voice recognition while having a mobile device with a shiny Apple on the back is still very much in vogue?

Source: Techcrunch