There were scores of stories in the blogosphere demanding to know where it was before the app finally landed.

I must express my personal disapproval with Google for keeping all those bedroom-dwelling fanboys waiting for so long. Don't they know who they're messing with? Can they not feel the awesome power of the adolescent army?

Anyhow, the arrival of any new voice app is always an event worth waiting for. It seldom runs smooth. Computers may be able to calculate pi to several million places, but they struggle with the vagaries of speech. The human voice is a strange and terrible thing. I should know. I'm from Birmingham.

And so it was that the inevitable hilarious stories emerged. The Daily Telegraph gleefully reported the app's inability to discern regional British accents, hearing a Welshman's 'iPhone' as 'gorilla'. An easy mistake to make.

(For a wonderful and hilarious demonstration of machine stupidity, check out this brilliant clip).

For my money, voice-powered apps can be filed alongside video calling, push-to-talk and other noble but essentially crap ideas. The iPhone's crowning achievement is its miraculous UI. Why the hell would you want to shout into it when you can brush and tilt it so satisfyingly?

Of course, in any discussion of muddle-headed IT concepts, the final word should go to the daddy of them all: Microsoft. Two years ago the company demonstrated the voice power of Vista. It didn't go well, with the PC displaying the words 'select all' when asked to select all - like an impudent schoolboy.

The demonstrator struggled manfully on, and the last sentence ended up as: "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all".

At least it got aunt right. That's one letter away from a lawsuit.