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According to a number of well-informed sources, Apple just acquired Siri, the personal mobile assistant that won the SXSW BizSpark Accelerator competition last month. Nobody at Siri is allowed to talk about this acquisition before Apple makes its own announcement, but our own sources confirm that this acquisition has indeed happened. These rumors are also substantiated by this recent FTC disclosure (PDF) by Apple and Siri.

Google is touting a new feature for their mobile VoIP application, Google Voice: instant notification of new SMS text messages and voicemails. You may have thought an app meant to replace your phone's functions would already be doing that, but in reality, Google Voice delayed notifications for 15 minutes by default. You could change this to 5 minutes or force a refresh manually, but many don't bother tweaking settings or obsessively refreshing just to see if they have new messages. Now that's no longer necessary - messages are delivered almost immediately.

YouTube may be one of the biggest success stories of the Web 2.0 era, but if you are hearing impaired, the site is only of limited value. Starting today, however, Google will begin to offer auto-captioning for all English-language videos on YouTube. Until now, only videos from a select number of YouTube's partners were captioned using the Google's automated speech-recognition software.

Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow. If you have an iPhone, you will be able to start doing that tonight. Siri, a virtual personal assistant, will recognize your voice query and either give you the answer to your question or connect you to the right web service.

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it's led to a fortunate inspiration, as well!

For those of you who are differently-abled - temporarily or otherwise - or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have.