Edible Apple

It’s no secret that Apple views Siri as one of  the key selling points of the iPhone 4S. Indeed, you need look no further than their commercials to see this. But in its current incarnation, Siri only works in 3 languages – English, French, and German.

Apple likes to start out small and slowly expand the feature set of its products and services as time goes on, and the same will likely apply to Siri. Apple, from the beginning, made clear that Siri was an ongoing and ever-growing project that would expand to include more languages and dialects.

What’s more, users won’t have to wait for the iPhone 5 to take advantage of Siri’s language enhancements since all of the language processing done on the server side.

Penn Olson reports:

The Chinese tech site DoNews claims to have heard from an Apple engineer who’s working on the Chinese-language version of Siri, the clever voice assistant on the iPhone 4S. From this source it claims that Siri will launch in Chinese next month, and is already undergoing internal testing this month.

In addition to understanding and speaking Chinese, Siri will soon also be able to give local information and navigation – something that’s currently limited only to the US.

Other languages reportedly on deck for the Siri treatment include Japanese and Russian. And better yet, these additional languages will reportedly come to Siri next month. Also note that Apple’s website states that Siri in 2012 will also include language support for Korean, Italian, and Spanish.

Siri remains in “Beta”, which is of course a move Google loves to play, so it’ll also be interesting to see when Apple drops that particular label.