Majel has long been rumoured as the search giant's rival to Apple's Siri personal assistant service. It should become available on Android smartphones later this year – most likely in the last quarter. According to reports it will officially (and unoriginally) be known as “Assistant”. While Google has obviously not spent much time on the name, the personal assisntant service has been in testing since last year and a showcasing at Google I/O late in June is bound to happen.

Majel, or Google Assistant will no doubt tap into the recently launched Knowledge Graph service which essentially combines Google's vast knowledge into a collection of objects and how they are all connected to one another. Think of it as similar to Wolfram Alpha, another knowledge database that recently caused embarrassment for Apple.

Aside, Samsung's S-Voice application leaked over the weekend and we've played with it a little bit. So far it seems to pick up my Kiwi accent pretty well. Instructions and a download mirror can be found here.

KitGuru says: We still feel like fools talking to our phones, so real life usefulness? Limited.

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