"It's like we're living in the future." I said that at least five dozen times over the past year or so. Everyone knows about Apple's new voice activated assistant named Siri that's available for the iPhone 4s (why it's not available for my iPhone 4, I'll never understand). It seems the Google Android team has been working on a similar app / service that has been lovingly named Majel. And, yes, it IS named for the first lady of the galaxy, Majel Roddenberry. Pretty darn cool.

It hasn't been officially released as of yet, but according to the Android & Me blog; Majel is an evolution of Google’s Voice Actions that is currently available on most Android phones with the addition of natural language processing. Where Voice Actions required you to issue specific commands like “send text to…” or “navigate to…”, Majel will allow you to perform actions in your natural language similar to how Siri functions.

Matia Duarte, Director, Android User Experience, gave hints about it earlier this year to Slashgear; “Our approach is more like Star Trek, right, starship Enterprise; every piece of computing surface, everything is voice-aware. It’s not that there’s a personality, it doesn’t have a name, it’s just Computer.”

We love hearing about obvious Trek fans that work in the industry and continue to try and make Trek tech a reality. Now only if they could sample Majel's voice...

(source Android & Me)