Ask Siri Anything

Nothing's nothing to Siri...

 

Microsoft exec: Siri is nothing special, we’ve had it for over a year | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence
TellMe versus Siri, the difference is results - The Next Web

 

Really curious to know what percentage of Siri enthusiasts will still be using this feature a year from now.

And I was just in Cupertino, where I'd think the reality distortion field would be strongest.

 

I'm not a big Siri user, but I do find it helpful while driving.

 

That, I can understand.

 

Siri has many bugs that need to worked out. I did not even find if that entertaining as a novelty item. It has a less than 50% success rate, at least for what I've challenged it with. Maybe I'm missing the real selling feature but I've completely stopped using it.

 

I think this is huge. Maybe not on the iPhone4S, but in general. Having native speech recognition could really help the paralyzed, for instance. Five or ten years from now, you'll start seeing phones without keyboards, you just say all your text messages and whatnot. Then it will be computers/tablets or whatever they will be, without keyboards. Keyboards will be like 3.5" floppy drives are now. Well, except for computer programmers. I can't imagine saying all those weird phrases and the customized editing. Kinda strange that programming is responsible for so much of this modern tech, and yet it really hasn't changed in the 20 years I've been doing it professionally. We're still using C (and C++ which is almost the same thing) which was developed back in the late 60's. The debugging tools are better, but that's it.

 

I agree, on a conceptual level voice recognition could be, potentially, a huge advance in how we interact with machines (although I sometimes wonder if it's an artifact from mid 20th Century futurism).

In other areas, air traffic control for example, using speech as a medium for communicating is actually rather old fashioned. Radio communications can be a bottleneck, often misunderstood, require the correct phrasology, etc. I wonder if that's not true in this instance, too, looking ahead a decade or two.

I use Apple products and have for quite some time. I appreciate good design and seamless operation. Perhaps I expect too much, but those attributes are a baseline for me, not things which are features in themselves. As far as Siri, seems like a bit of a marketing gimmick as it's applied to the iPhone. And the buzz it generated is, in my opinion, primarily a function of the Apple reality distortion field. I mean, Woz on his goofy Segway in line to get a new iPhone? What's up with that?

 

One thing I use Siri for a lot is to check the weather, especially while traveling. Quick and easy.

 

The latest Apple ads show someone asking whether they should carry an umbrella. Siri takes them to a page providing a simple day by day weather breakdown; either the sun is shining, it's partially cloudy, or it's raining.

That's not a tremendous amount of information.

On the other hand, if I want to look at weather radar, or another more complex weather product, the bulk of the interaction is not getting to that product, but assimilating information visually. Heck, I can push one button on the phone and see doppler radar, and I'll bet that's faster than speaking the command.

After that, even if Siri could translate the visual into words and say, "There's light amount of precipitation moving in from the West at ten knots, it's over San Francisco at the moment. Outside of that, there is a moderately heavy band of precipitation over the East Bay, with its northerly limit over Marin, its southerly limit over San Jose, its westerly limit over Half Moon Bay and its easterly limit over Pleasanton...etc..." and describe the whole picture to me, it'd still be faster—and information would be conveyed much more clearly—if I just looked at the picture myself. And let's not even consider motion.

What would be really cool is if Siri could display the doppler radar on the MFD in the car. That would make a lot more sense to me.

Otherwise, except for a few isolated uses, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

 

It's enough for me to know what to pack for a short trip to Occupy Utopia recently:

 

I have bookmarks for weather, both on my desktop computer and on my iPod Touch. One tap opens the browser, a swish scrolls through the bookmarks, and another tap opens the weather site to the city I'm interested in. I don't see Siri being any "easier."

 

I open Siri and ask it a simple question. I find that a little quicker, and a lot more natural.

 

Siri is the equivalent of a vocal on-off switch.

It's the light on the dash which illuminates when the oil pressure is low.

I prefer a gauge.

Siri is not that.

 

If only Siri could turn Bluetooth or Wi-Fi on/off I'd be so pleased.

 

On the 4S I can swipe down on the screen to see the notification center, a la Android, which includes current weather conditions at my location.

It's when I need to find out weather conditions elsewhere that I either use my Weather app or Siri. For a quick look, Siri is sufficient. For detailed weather maps and severe warnings, I use the app in real-time mode to get continuous updates.

Each has its use and purpose.

 

I have a few cities that I visit often programmed into my app. But when traveling to places that I may not ever go back again it's too much trouble to enter them in.

 

This morning my six-year old asked me, as he was trying to decide what to wear to school:

"Can you ask your iPhone how many degrees it is outside?"