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If you’ve spent any time with Siri, you may have noticed that you can actually ask it to search the web for pretty much anything. At this point, Siri fires up a Google search and populates the search field with whatever it thinks you asked. The degree of accuracy here very much depends on your accent and whether it’s a full moon or not, but on the whole, it does the job fairly well.

But did you know that you can also have Siri work its magic with both the Microsoft Bing and Yahoo search engines? Well, you can…

In a post on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reminds us that, should Google not be your search engine of choice, you can always tell Siri which flavor of search you wish to use.

The key is adding the word “Bing” or “Yahoo” to your query, such as, “search Bing for weather” or “search yahoo for Apple earnings.” Siri heads off to the relevant search engine, and you’re golden.

If you prefer to use any one search engine as a default, you can always set that in the iPhone’s Settings, in which case you’d need to say “search Google” to use Google.com. Either way, there’s a little more flexibility here than we first thought.

Last Sunday, Google purposely pulled its Google Voice app from the App Store due to some bug that caused the app to crash at sign in.

Almost a week later, Google Voice is now back in the App Store, with some stability improvement and also a new feature…

According to the Google Voice Twitter account, the app now “improves calling through GV when there is no data: no data required for all numbers previously called.”

Google sure took its time to fix that app!

You might not see it right away in the App Store, but you can access directly from here.

Our neighbour (Singapore) has commenced its pre-order for the iPhone 4S. Below we have the pricing with RM equivalent with exchange rate of ($1 = RM2.5):

16GB – $948 (RM2,370)
32GB – $1,088 (RM2,720)
64GB – $1,238 (RM3,095)

Each customers can buy up to 2 units and shipping duration is listed as 1-2 weeks. There’s also a 12 months interest-free installment plan with Citibank for easy payment. This gives a rough idea of the iPhone 4S pricing if it reaches Malaysia. If the trend is similar to the iPad 2, we can expect ours to be cheaper than the Singaporeans in terms of listed price.

For more information, head over to Singapore Apple Store.

The first iPhone 4S commercial has just made its debut in the US and it’s all about Siri.

Yes, Siri is intelligent no doubt, but considering its limited scope (limited support outside of US, limited language support) and almost not understanding of the local context in Malaysia, Siri could just be another voice-recognition software when the iPhone 4S arrives in the country.

Take a look at this video especially towards the end when Siri answers “noted”. The computing that goes on behind this piece of software is extraordinary. We will say that Siri is one very intelligent piece of code and this video demonstrates Siri’s intelligence amazingly.

Question now is, is Siri practical in everyday use? Especially when you’re talking to it in noisy environments. What do you think?