There are rumors floating round that Google will launch its own version of Apple’s voice assistant Siri before the end of the year.

Android and Me report the codename for the new application wil be Majel. Trekkies will be familiar with the voice of the Federation Computer for who Majel Barrett-Roddenberry provides the voice.

As you may know Google already has Voice Action functionality on its current versions of Android but  Majel hopes to make the processing of the commands more natural, currently you have to stick to a structured format if you want to,  for example send a text to someone. Majel will free you from the structured format. ie “send text to John” with Majel could be said like the following “I want to write a text to John”.

Google hopes to have a version released before the end of the year but this will have limited functionality, a fully featured deployment will be released  early in the new year.

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I personally I am not an avid user of voice actions on my phone, I rarely use them if ever. I never saw them being part of the main stream when using a phone. Of course there are situations when voice could come into its own, such as when you are driving but most times when  I’m using my phone I’m not in  a place where I feel speaking commands into it is exactly the actions of a sane man! Siri users have said they loose interest in the functionality after a week.

I’ve seen a few hacks of Siri which are very interesting and with some more can be use to control various aspects of your home, lights, blinds etc… Majel could excel in this ares it being an open source platform. I’m looking forward to future developments of Majel outside of the phone rather than on the phone itself!