Meet Siri, your personal iPhone assistant

Want to to know what the weather is like in Seattle or Austin without checking the Web or even your pre-set weather maps on your phone? How about having your text messages read to you? Siri will do that for you and a whole lot more. Apple unveiled the personal assistant as part of its iPhone 4S announcement Tuesday.

Siri is the company Apple bought last year for an estimated $200 million, and developed the artificial intelligence behind the program. Apple exec Scott Forstall showed off Siri with various questions and impressive answers, such as:

Forstall: "What time is it in Paris?"

Siri: "The time in Paris, France is 8:16 p.m." and shows a live clock.

Forstall: "Wake me up tomorrow at 6 a.m."

Siri: "OK, I set it for 6 a.m."

Then Forstall asked Siri to find him a "great Greek restaurant in Palo Alto."

Siri: "I've found five Greek restaurants, and I’ve sorted them by rating."

In addition, Siri can also set up meetings for you, take dictation and search the Web, including instant Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha searches.

"For decades technologists have teased us with this dream that we can talk to our technology," Forstall said. Now you can ...  although many of us have spent years talking to our technology — without it talking back.

Siri will come with built-in with support for English, French, and German. It will be beta at the start, Forstall said, with more languages and services added "over time."

And over time, Siri will be taken quite seriously if it isn't already.

"Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ artificial intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event," Siri cofounder Norman Winarsky said in a recent interview with 9to5mac. "Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use."