People are starting to get their iPhone 4s phones in the mail already and it seems everyone is quite impressed by Siri. One tech writer said it’s like “alien technology”. No, you can’t ask it (her?) anything - it’s not yet tied into some functions of the phone – for instance, you can’t ask it to turn up the brightness.
But what you can do is supposedly amazing. Of course, it didn’t take long for people to start asking Siri funny things, and Siri has answers for many of them. These are her actual replies to some crazy inquiries. I’m not making this up:
How old are you?: “I’m not allowed to tell you that”
I’m drunk: “I found 12 taxi companies nearby, here they are…” (she thankfully doesn’t, as one reviewer put it, call your ex-girlfriend).
I love you: “Do you say that to all the handsets?”
What is your name: “Siri. But you already knew that.”
Will you marry me: “Marriage is not supported by my end-user license agreement”
And as you can imagine, far more graphic things have been said to poor Siri which I will not repeat here.
Siri seems to handle speech recognition very well, far better than a phone, even a powerful one, should be able to do. And there is a reason for that. All queries are sent up to the cloud and are processed by powerful back-end servers running special Nuance custom software. The results are then sent back to the phone for action. This all happens very quickly, but it does require a connection to the internet.
I cannot help to think that this is the future of computing we’ve been told is coming for decades, realized for the first time in an actual working system. It will get better with time, and just imagine what could be done with it.
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