Engadget caught wind of the fact that Apple has filed a patent for an "intelligent automated assistant," which sounds like the nice lady (or man) in your iPhone (or, as of iOS 6, iPad 3) called Siri. The application talks at length about a digital assistant controlled using speech (it's Siri), which takes a user's speech input (again, it's Siri), and then fulfills the speaker's request using digitized speech. In other words, a patent for Siri.
Unfortunate
