When Microsoft put speech recognition in XP, were you complaining? When Nuance made Dragon dictate? When Kurzweil made Voicepad Pro? When Google made the Android only Voice offering? Were you complaining they had hardware requirements or were platform or OS specific? But now Apple buy and release it in a way people like, easily a decade after this kind of technology was first commercially and suddenly that's why nobody else has innovated?
And your complaint isn't even accurate aside from that - DARPA funded SRI for military purposes, SRI finished their military contract and reformed to a commercial company and Apple bought them (I.e. innovation happenings) and in an interview with the company founder he said they had to struggle to get it to run on the 3GS and implied it would be much better on better hardware. Speculation is that it does voice recognition on the client (I.e. There are plausible technical reasons why not every smartphone could run the current implementation).
Having to differentiate their native platform drives innovation, its having to support the lowest common denominator and backwards compatibility which stifles it, and patents which roadblock it.
My Macbook Pro should be powerful enough to run the Siri software. But Apple doesn't let me use it because they only put it on a particular, expensive, smartphone.
And your complaint isn't even accurate aside from that - DARPA funded SRI for military purposes, SRI finished their military contract and reformed to a commercial company and Apple bought them (I.e. innovation happenings) and in an interview with the company founder he said they had to struggle to get it to run on the 3GS and implied it would be much better on better hardware. Speculation is that it does voice recognition on the client (I.e. There are plausible technical reasons why not every smartphone could run the current implementation).
Having to differentiate their native platform drives innovation, its having to support the lowest common denominator and backwards compatibility which stifles it, and patents which roadblock it.