Donna is the name of a new iOS app that blends location services, calendaring, reminders and push notifications to embody an actual personal assistant that keeps your schedule for you. It was created by the four founders at San Francisco’s Incredible Labs: former Twitter product lead Kevin Cheng, along with Scott San Filippo, Arshad Tayyeb and Spence Murray, who arrived from Gracenote, DoubleTwist and Netscape, respectively.

Siri is a voice-powered assistant — you ask Siri questions about anything, from directions to making reservations for dinner. Donna’s creators are less focused on search; this app asks the questions and triest to anticipate what you need before you even have to ask what’s next on your personal schedule.

In developing the app, they talked to personal assistants, executive assistants, and people who employ them to understand the attributes that makes for a good assistant. They didn’t just pick a random woman’s name — the app is named after an iconic television assistant: Donna Moss, the assistant to the Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman on The West Wing –  and someone they think reflects the best qualities of a person in that position: proactive, strong, intelligent, Cheng said.

“Good assistants seem to be people who, you ask them something, and they give the information back to you,” Cheng told me in a call earlier this week. “But really great assistants are the ones that are a step ahead of you and gave you the information before you realized you even needed it.”

In that way Donna shares similarities with Google Now — which is Android-only at the moment. That’s a search product, but it also uses location and user habits to anticipate what you want. But it doesn’t quite mimic the schedule-keeping of an assistant.

Putting an app to work for you

Based on all the stuff she does, it’s clear Donna is intended for really busy people — people who use an app like AnyDO or Wunderlist may see similarities, but with an added proactive element. It takes your appointment details from your phone’s calendar, uses your contacts, your location and the location of where you need to be next to tell you where and when you need to leave to make your next appointment on time. It cuts out fiddling with your phone to figure out directions, the weather or what’s coming next on your calendar.

It does other things to mimic a real human assistant too: you get a push notification when it’s time to leave for your next meeting; you get an update at the end of the day about what’s on the schedule for tomorrow; and if it’s raining at the location you’re heading too it’ll let you know to bring an umbrella.

But the app is designed so that you actually don’t spend that much time in it: you simply get a notification for what’s next (or a call, which is in the works). And in order to not be annoying it only notifies you with something that immediately needs your attention — time to leave, time to get on a Skype call or Webex discussion, time to wake up, etc.

From there it does a lot of work for you: swipe the notification for a conference call and it will not only automatically dial you in, it will put in the conference code and mute you as well — to mimic a personal assistant dialing you in.

The app is free and the company won’t have any ads in Donna — the info you share with your personal assistant should stay personal, Cheng said — but they do have a business plan in mind: subscription access. But that’s only if they can make themselves “valuable” enough someday to charge, he said.

Donna is launching in private beta starting Thursday, so you’ll have to sign up for an invitation. Cheng says he hopes to open the app to the public soon after.

Incredible Labs has raised $2.5 million in seed funding so far from Khosla Ventures, Betaworks, Maynard Webb, Crunchfund, Ashton Kutcher and others.

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Now Nuance, however, plans to break down those barriers between its separate platforms, and focus on what it’s calling “intelligent systems.” The idea is to create a personal assistant that will persist beyond the interface, that can be accessed anywhere from the cloud, said Matt Revis, VP and GM of Nuance’s handset division. “We want to unify the personal assistance experience across form factors,” Revis told GigaOM.

As part of that intelligent systems effort, Nuance is trying to delve deeper into language in addition to broadening spoken language’s scope in a technology. Its NLU technology already understands context and idiom to a certain degree. But Revis said it is launching an initiative called Living Language that will allow its servers to dynamically update and speech databases to reflect changing language patterns as they occur.

“What you get is a very rapidly evolving language model, one that almost moves ahead of the zeitgeist,” Revis said. Living Language will get its first test not on Nuance’s voice platforms, but in its evolving predictive-text interface Swype. Nuance will use crowdsourcing to start analyzing new words Swype users type into their texts and emails. As new words and phrases begin trending, Swype will update its lexicon and make that new vocabulary available to its Swype apps.

Nuance launched the new crowdsourcing capabilities at CES 2013 on Monday, making them available in the latest version of the Swype Android beta (users will need to opt in to send data as well as receive dictionary updates). But Revis said the company plans to expand those capabilities to voice technologies. “We’re just starting with the keyboard,” Revis said.

As for the rest of Nuance’s intelligent systems work, Revis said we’ll have to wait to see specific products, but as the year goes on we should start seeing closer integration of its various consumer-facing and white-label voice command platforms: Dragon TV, Dragon Go, Dragon Drive, Dragon Dictation and Dragon Mobile Assistant.

The building blocks are already in place for that integration, Revis said. Most of Nuance’s products rely on a hybrid approach, using software on the device for simple voice commands, but reaching out into the cloud for more complex speech recognition features. The key will be moving the assistant itself into the cloud to sit alongside the enabling technology, knocking down the walls separating its now-distinct voice assistants.

A common voice for a common platform

Each interface will remain specialized to a certain degree. Your TV doesn’t need to understand the command “turn down the AC,” for example, but there will be a lot of crossover between platforms. For instance, we could use our TVs to update our social networks, and tell our phones to tell our TVs to record programs while we’re away.

Nuance also plans to do a lot of cosmetic work, creating unified themes for the app’s graphical user interfaces and a common set of voices and personalities for the assistants themselves. It’s imperative to create a common user experience to get consumers to embrace the idea of a universal voice assistant, Revis said.

Nuance will offer its universal assistant across its own Dragon products, but its primary business is licensing technology to hardware vendors – this will be no exception. Manufacturers like Apple, Samsung and LG sell across the consumer electronics landscape, making it possible for Nuance to bridge their TV and smartphone lines. Nuance also hopes to cross-license technology between vendors, so, for instance, a Samsung could partner with a Ford to ensure their TVs and cars use a common voice interface, Revis said.

As Nuance delves into more areas like the connected home and internet of things, there will be more opportunities to connect and interlink more devices. That’s where the potential of universal assistant could really get big. A talking washing machine or refrigerator might be useful, but a washing machine you could talk to through your smartphone would be even more useful.

Update: At CES, Nuance revealed two new customers for its Dragon Drive technology: Chrysler and ZTE. Chrysler will tap into Dragon Drive Messaging, speech recognition software that will allow driver to compose, send and listen to text messages using a voice interface. Chrysler is  implementing the service in its new Sprint-powered UConnect connected car platform, starting with the 2013 RAM 1500 and the 2013 STR Viper.

ZTE isn’t building a connected car platform so much as its developing a hands-free system. ZTE will begin embedding an app in its forthcoming Android phones called Car Mode, which allows users to control of variety of the phones functions — such as launching navigation apps, playing music and listening to dictated text messages — through simple voice prompts.

Update 2: The Next Web is reporting that Nuance has a code name for its cloud assistant, Project Wintermute.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock user brem stocker; Screaming image courtesy Flickr user Lazurite.

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Lexee actually builds off Nuance’s technology for online speech recognition and speech to text, so it’s similar in actual performance. The system is designed to help users accomplish tasks and interact using conversational speech. But Angel believes Lexee can stand out because of the ease with which developers can create their conversation flows and the analytical data that they can get back from Lexee.

Lexee uses a simple point-and-click system called SiteBuilder, a toolkit that Angel first developed for IVR and call center applications. It allows non-developers to easily apply voice to any customer interaction. Lexee will also rely on Angel’s analytics, so developers will get back information on how consumers are interacting with Lexee and where any problems might arise in conversation flows.

Angel President Dave Rennyson said neither Nina nor AT&T’s Watson, which also has its own SDK, provides that mix of ease of use and reporting. He said Lexee was used to voice-enable a Salesforce.com application in just four days. Angel, a division of MicroStrategy, currently has about 1,000 enterprise customers using its existing customer experience management tools including Best Buy, Pfizer, Barnes & Noble and Facebook. He said those companies could be interested in re-using some of their work and applying Lexee to their mobile applications.

Lexee is just another sign of how our future will be filled with voice-enabled personal assistants. Siri has opened a lot of people’s eyes as to how speech can be used to get at complex tasks and can be combined with other tools to make us a lot more efficient.

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Robert Scoble recently posted this 32-minute video with Alohar Mobile’s Placeme’s founder, Sam Liang, to get a complete description of the app. I recommend watching the entire conversation, but if you skip to the 2:40 mark, you’ll see Liang show you where he’s been and what he’s done for the past day, as captured automatically by Placeme.

Obviously, the scary part is that the app essentially learns everything about you: Where you shop, your route to work, who you visit, etc. Liang says the data isn’t shared or broadcast and that it’s encrypted. Without question, this may be the most pervasive type of mobile software to date. But I’m inclined to agree with Scoble when he says this is the future. Whether we like it or not, the world is fundamentally changing due to the Internet and our ability to share information seamlessly.

If you can get past this change there’s the potential for a world of useful information. Liang mentions that the app could check your route home from work in advance to check for traffic. Or perhaps it can alert you that another gas station nearby has cheaper gas than the station you just pulled into. When the phone has this type of history, it can truly be a smart personal assistant.

Will people be willing to give up privacy for this type of help? Over time, I think so; especially with the younger generation that is growing up with smartphones, tablets and location-based apps. Like Scoble, I’m a sucker for anything that brings the future closer to me today, so I’ve installed Placeme for now to see exactly what my phone can learn about me. After all, the future is inevitable.

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What can SpeakToIt Assistant do?

I spent some time with SpeakToIt on both an old iPhone 3GS and my iPad 2 earlier today, and while it’s somewhat limited compared to Siri — more on that later — the $1.99 app can assist with certain tasks. Using the software, I was able to compose and send text messages and emails from my iPhone and my iPad; note that on the iPad, SpeakToIt appears as an iPhone app with support for pixel doubling.

SpeakToIt Assistant can also search the web for various information. I asked it to search Amazon for a product and the results were spot on. A small window with results opens in the top half of the display, but with one tap, these can be expanded to a full screen. Other searchable items include images, maps, news, stock information, the IMDB site and weather nearby or around the world.

Search results take place quickly; in some cases faster than Siri. That could be due to more people using Apple’s software and servers versus those using SpeakToIt. You can customize the look of the assistant and turn conversation mode on or off.

Multiple skills, but not hooks into iOS

Also in the list of skills are features to organize events or your agenda, tasks, translate words or phrases from English and a calculator for basic math or conversion of currency or measures. I rely on Siri’s “what’s my day look like?” function on a daily basis, and a “what’s on my calendar?” query worked just fine. I first had to give the OK for SpeakToIt to see my Google Calendar; the app isn’t hooked into the native iOS Calendar software.

And if you allow SpeakToIt to access your Twitter or Facebook accounts, you can send tweets or update your status by voice. You can also check in to FourSquare, although I didn’t try that function yet. Tweets and status updates worked out really well in my tests; better than the email dictations I tried.

Limitations and voice input

Here’s where the limitations come in. Although SpeakToIs Assistant is powered by Nuance, the same as Siri, I found message dictation to be marginal at best for some reason. With Siri, I can speak multiple sentences, along with punctuation, and the text is perfect nearly every time. With SpeakToIt, even when trying to add punctuation, my dictations became giant run-on sentences without punctuation.

And although the app has a coversation mode, so that you don’t have to hit the microphone button for every command, it’s not quite as conversational as Siri. If you want to talk about weather in several places, that’s fine. But the process of creating a message ends with the message dictation. You have to manually send it by tapping the Send button.

Siri also has better native app integration as well. I tried to create a reminder with SpeakToIt assistant, but it could only do so with Evernote. No such luck setting an alarm with the native Clock app, either. This is where Siri shines: It’s integrated at a lower level with iOS than any third-party option likely ever will be.

Worth a try if you temper expectations

Still, SpeakToIt assistant shows promise as a $1.99 app, as I’d expect it to keep maturing and improving. Folks that don’t want to pay for the app just yet can take a free chance on Valentine’s Day: the software will be free to the first 100,000 people who download it, and $0.99 after that for the remainder of the day.

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Last week, Arieso released a report stating iPhone 4S users were consuming twice the data as their iPhone 4 counterparts. Arieso placed the blame squarely on Siri, the new personal assistant that allows users to initiate searches and basic phone actions through voice command. Siri, however, is just a scapegoat. Siri may be the mechanism for more searches on the iPhone 4S, but the application itself consumes a miniscule amount of data.

I reached out to Vlad Sejnoha, CTO of Nuance Communications, which provides the automated voice recognition technology that powers Siri. Sejnoha said he couldn’t comment on Siri specifically, but generally, network voice recognition platforms send highly compressed audio files from the phone to network-based servers any time a voice command is initiated. Nuance’s own Dragon Go voice-search app usually only sends tens of kilobytes per voice prompt, and the amount of data sent back to the device is even tinier, since Dragon Go doesn’t have to futz around with an audio recording on the return path, Sejnoha said.

However, that doesn’t mean Siri isn’t driving more data usage even if it isn’t draining bandwidth itself. Sejnoha said voice-driven user interfaces and natural speech recognition are encouraging more and deeper searches for mobile web content simply because the technology is easier to use on the go than the usual finger-tap methods. If customers are using Siri to get to video sharing and streaming sites or using it to find applications to download more often and more easily, then you would expect a big increase in data usage.

“Invoking searches or media consumption may require greater bandwidth, but no more than if these actions were initiated in conventional ways, and the size of the data ‘payload’ can vary immensely depending on what the user is doing,” Sejnoha said in an email.

Still, it’s hard to imagine those Siri-driven searches are producing a doubling of data traffic to the 4S versus the iPhone 4. You can use Siri to easily get to YouTube or Pandora websites, but Siri can’t open the YouTube or Pandora iOS apps, which are infinitely more useful for actually streaming video and music. Many of Siri’s most tantalizing features – setting reminders, dictating text messages, initiating calls, getting weather and schedule updates – would consume only the most miniscule amount of network data. The bevy of new features in the iPhone 4S, from iCloud over-the-air music and data synchronization to its more powerful processor, all could be contributing to an explosion in data usage much more than Siri.

It’s more accurate to look at Siri as another of Apple’s long line of user interface innovations — the original iPhone touchscreen, the first Safari microbrowser and the concept of the mobile app – that have made it subsequently easier for smartphone users to interact with Internet services on a tiny device.

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Nuance, which helps power Apple’s Siri, has been a leader in the space but has had to contend with rival Vlingo, which also has similar technology and has put out its own Siri-like personal assistant app. Nuance previously sued Vlingo for patent infringement, but a federal jury sided with Vlingo in August. The companies were apparently contemplating further litigation, but now that all falls to the wayside as the two put aside their differences to make money together. Nuance said the combined company will go after a $5 billion opportunity enabling phones, tablets, cars, televisions, navigation devices, music players and PCs with intelligent voice recognition and analysis.

Here’s what the two CEOs had to say. First, Mike Thompson of Nuance:

Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services. By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand.

Meanwhile, Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan downplayed the two companies past differences to focus on their common business model:

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Of course, the outage was annoying and inconvenient, and hopefully Apple learned a valuable lesson about managing a large-scale, persistent data service managed from its own server facility, and this will never happen again. But the extent of the outcry as the outage wore on, as well as the attempts on Friday to follow up and try to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, show that Siri’s effect on the mobile landscape is not insignificant.

It could be the case that Apple’s servers couldn’t handle the demand that Siri was putting on the system, as some users who contacted Apple support about the problem were told. That would indicate that Apple underestimated the scale of demand for Siri, which suggests the personal assistant is being used a lot. But even if the problem is independent of demand, the fact that the news of Siri’s going down spread as far and as quickly as it did, and elicited so much response from the user community, indicates that it is finding a place in people’s lives. Some of the media attention could be attributed to the fact that people love when a winner like Apple stumbles, but user concern seems genuine.

When Apple first announced the personal assistant software, I admit to thinking that Siri had limited value beyond triggering an initial feeling of novelty that would fade quickly. After using Siri myself, I found that it actually had a lot of real use value, even in countries where it hasn’t yet gained localization features. The indignation of users affected by the outage indicates that I wasn’t the only one who found myself leaning on Siri a lot more heavily than I expected to.

It’s not as widespread, but the outcry about Siri’s downtime reminds me of the web-wide groans that go up every time the Twitter fail whale makes one of its visits or when Tumblr takes a tumble. That’s a minor PR problem for Apple in the short term, but in the larger picture, it’s a very good thing that people miss Siri when she’s not around.

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In health care we face numerous challenges. One that is being tackled by the FCC, Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation is the limited nature of our emergency 911 system. Currently, if one is dialing from a cellphone, chances are that 911 cannot automatically find their location. And the only way to contact 911 is the traditional way — by telephone.

All of that is about to change. Next Generation 911 will allow for communications to be made by voice, video or text. Location will automatically be appended to voice calls, saving time and confusion when the caller doesn’t know where they’re location is — or isn’t able to verbally communicate it.

As someone who analyzes health policy (with a focus on long-term services and supports), I believe that Siri, Apple’s recently introduced natural language voice technology, has the potential to change not just our 911 system, but also to be one of the biggest consumer-facing technologies in health care that we’ve seen in decades.

Emergency health care today

Imagine this scenario: an elderly person is having a cardiac event. She is having trouble breathing and is unable to complete a sentence. Dialing 911 is possible, but if the caller is unable to narrate the condition, first responders would still be in the dark until they arrive.

Even after they do arrive, information still eludes them: some critical — including prior medical history, current medications and allergic reactions to medicines — and some logistical, such as health insurance and next of kin.

The future: A Siri-enabled 911

Siri’s main features – its ability to understand natural language and its quick and contextual deep search, information retrieval and task completion – could drastically change all this.

Once the word “emergency” is spoken to Siri, a range of beneficial activity could commence. First, the phone could video call 911 utilizing Skype or a similar VoIP video service. This would allow first responders to have a much better context of the emergency at hand. Armed with a live video and audio feed of the event, visual cues could assist the first responders as they deconstruct the problem. Second, Siri could send the GPS location of the caller.

Third, an app could automatically transmit critical information to the nearest hospital. First Choice Healthcare already has an app that gathers this information – primary care physician, current medications and any drug allergies – for a patient heading to the ER. Depending on the patient’s physician, it’s possible that the patient’s entire electronic health record (EHR) loaded into the app (or otherwise shared with authorized medical personnel) as well.

Lastly, Siri could send a text or email to the chosen next of kin, letting them know that an emergency has transpired and their family member is being transported to the closest hospital (with the address included).

That may sound a bit out of place considering Siri can’t even dial 911 right now. But the reason for that is simple: Apple hasn’t instituted a way of authenticating that a call is real and not a prank. However with video and the additional information appended to the call (again, including location), the chances of a prank dial are miniscule.

Now compare the two pictures. Which patient has a better chance of surviving the cardiac event? More than 300,000 people die from sudden cardiac events each year in the U.S. A large portion of these are preventable, not only due to lifestyle changes but also, in part, because of the nature of the emergency response and the preparation on the part of the individual. These are both areas where Siri, along with Next Generation 911, could play a fascinating role.

Siri beyond 911

But it’s not just emergency care that could be transformed with Siri. a few other uses also come to mind. Such challenges include home health monitoring and assistance.

Millions of elderly adults are living at home and are unable to fully complete needed daily tasks. They may receive some assistance for a portion of the day from a licensed health care professional, but many still only have a family member or friend stop by and assist. Regardless of what kind of help they get, after the help leaves, they may struggle to remember when to take prescribed medication and treatments, they could forget doctors’ appointments, and they may not be able to keep their family fully in the loop (until the next visit or major event happens). Worst of all, they are more susceptible to injury or worse when a medical emergency transpires.

Siri and the convergence of disparate tools

There are numerous gadgets geared toward this population. But not only are they pricey, they are also far less personal and much harder to use than Siri. Siri requires holding down the home button (the only button available on the face of an iPhone) and speaking. Who couldn’t remember to do that?

At the tap of a button, Siri will be able to set and vocalize reminders for when to take pills, can initiate video check-ups with family and care providers, and can begin a smooth chain reaction of events that would otherwise require far more time and energy to do — two things our elderly, chronically ill population have the least of.

This transition to home health care will only become more common as states look to pivot from providing the bulk of the care in institutions to care being provided in homes and communities. People not only are happier when they live at home but they also live longer, feel better, and react better to treatments. If that were not enough, institutional care is far too costly. Long-term services currently account for, on average, “one-third of state Medicaid budgets,” and 58 percent of it is spent on institutional care, according to Lewin Consulting, a preeminent health consulting firm (PDF download).

Clearly it won’t just be Siri alone in this revolution of health care. Many more services will be created, and many more similar innovations are on the horizon. But every revolution needs its leader, and Siri is undoubtedly it.

John S. Wilson is a health policy analyst and editor of PolicyDiary, a weekly health policy blog. He can be reached at john@policydiary.com or on Twitter: @johnswilson1. 

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Rubin, speaking at the AllThingsD AsiaD conference on Wednesday, said he had reservations about the nature of Siri. Here’s how Rubin worded his fears in discussion with Walt Mossberg:

I don’t believe your phone should be an assistant. Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.

He also doesn’t think the act will catch on, despite conceding that “to some degree it is natural for you to talk to your phone.” Apple has a good head start, with 4 million iPhones sold during the 4S launch weekend, and AT&T announced 1 million new iPhone 4S activations on Thursday morning. But admittedly, just because people are buying the devices doesn’t mean they will use the service.

Rubin seems to be arguing that the job of a phone is to be transparently helpful to the process of interpersonal communication; it’s meant to facilitate talking, not become the target of that act. From the perspective of a Skynet-controlled dystopian future in which our primary relationships are with things, not people, I might agree.

But obviously, that bleak sci-fi premise hasn’t yet come to pass. And Siri is still all about communication; I’ve sent more text messages and emails to family and friends in the past few days than I have in the past month, I’d guess. Siri isn’t about creating a closed loop between you and your phone; it’s about making your phone more useful, something I’d imagine Android owners are interested in, too.

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