I wonder at what point Apple is going to have to start building these kinds of technologies. Purchasing Siri was supposed to be a step in that direction but nothing has come of it yet.

I worry that it's not in Apple's DNA to build products they can't directly charge for. Apple doesn't do freemium. The hope would be that third parties would pick up the slack.

However I'm not sure that startups can match Google in bigdata. So how will Apple catch up in voice recognition? In mapping (which also uses Android data to improve things like traffic and rerouting)?