Siri, Google Voice Actions and other mobile speech assistant tools have promise, but they often fail to do what we ask them. And so we find ourselves scrolling one-fingered through mountains of messages looking for the right one, or painstakingly copy-pasting addresses into mobile maps.
A cognitive-science professor named Nick Cassimatis thinks all these big companies are doing natural language search wrong, and he and two grad students have built their own set of tools — and a start-up called SkyPhrase — to try to show them up.
SkyPhrase today searches Gmail, Twitter and Orbitz, through its own Web site, Chrome extension and iPhone app.
