Apple announced speech recognition for the next iPhone. Big deal. Android’s had it for more than a year. Apple is just playing “catch-up” and the feature’s not really earth-shattering anyway. Right?

Wrong. Everything in that opening paragraph is wrong, except the sentence that reads “big deal.” Siri is a very big deal, the biggest of deals.

In fact, Siri is the most important thing to happen to mobile in this decade so far. 

Siri naysayers fall into two camps: 1) those who say it’s no big deal; and 2) those who say Android has had it since August. Both classes of naysayers are wrong.

Siri is a Very Big Deal

As I detailed in this Cult of Mac post, Siri traces its lineage directly back to the largest artificial intelligence project in history, the Pentagon’s CALO project. CALO stands for “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes,” and the project involved over 300 of the world’s top researchers in various aspects of A.I.

The entire Pentagon project was headed by Adam Cheyer, who is now director of engineering for Apple’s iPhone group.

Speaking to MIT Technology Review, Cheyer said that CALO sought to integrate “dialog and natural-language understanding, vision, speech, machine learning, planning, reasoning, service delegation and integrate them all into a… human-like assistant that can help you get things done.”

He described the Siri project as seeking to do the same thing in a consumer product. In fact, for the past four years, Cheyer and his team have been focused on optimizing the parts of CALO technology that can execute from a powerful cell phone and be usable by millions of everyday consumers. For the past year and a half, they’ve been working hard to integrate Siri technology into the iPhone OS and application set.

It’s not “voice recognition.” It’s artificial intelligence. And A.I. in your cell phone is a very big deal.