Where Apple starts to really pull away from Voice Actions is with Siri's personalization features. For example, Siri is able to process a lot of natural language requests to give you the information you need. You can ask Siri if you will need an umbrella on Monday and it will understand that you are looking for weather information. Android's Voice Actions currently requires direct commands such as "navigate to..." or "note to self," and it's not clear if Voice Actions will be able to process such natural language commands in Android 4.0.

There are many other personalized features in Siri, including the ability to set reminders based on your location. You can ask Siri to remind you to pick up milk once you leave work, or to buy donuts for the office as you're leaving home. Location-based reminder functionality can also be used in non-Siri devices running iOS 5 through the .

Siri can also process and store your personal relationships. You can tell Siri who your mother is, who your siblings are and so on. And, as long as those people are in your address book, Siri will call them upon request. So you can say, for example, "Call Mom" instead of "Call Joan Smith" (or whatever you mother's name happens to be).

Siri also offers a number of extras that Voice Actions currently doesn't have, such as the ability to schedule calendar events, get stock info, retrieve basic facts and figures from Wolfram Alpha, and set alarms and timers.

To overcome these deficiencies, Android users can augment Voice Actions with a number of third-party apps such as (free), (free) and ($2.99) by Pannous. These apps claim to add more Siri-like functionality including the aforementioned alarm settings, adding calendar events, and asking for basic facts and figures. Vlingo even lets you open other apps on your phone with your voice, update your Twitter and Facebook statuses or check-in on Foursquare (a version of Vlingo is also available in the iPhone App Store). Speaktoit Assistant claims it can process natural language similar to Siri.