"Siri, why did Apple make you?"..."Apple doesn't tell me everything you know." Thus speaks Siri, the artificially intelligent personal digital assistant from the iPhone 4S that's all over the tech and regular press because she's charming, useful, novel (even if her sharp wit wasn't originally developed by Apple), and works unlike almost every other encounter with voice-recognition tech you may have had: well.
Siri has a huge cuteness angle, inspiring a website and thousands of
tweets, because the programmers behind Siri made her sweet, slightly
schoolmarmish voice (or, alternatively, a gently flu-ridden BBC news
reader male voice) marry up to a sassy personality that's more akin to Douglas Adams' Eddie the Shipboard Computer ("I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me!") rather than HAL 9000
("I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.") These easter eggs are
fun, and the jokey human-mirroring behavior Siri exhibits is probably
carefully chosen to make her fun, appealing, and less intimidating for
man-in-the-street iPhone users. What can you ask her? Try these (click
Answer for Siri's reply--also, Siri's replies might vary when you ask):
"Siri, why?" (Answer)
"I don't know. Frankly I've wondered that myself." [link]
"Siri, beam me up." (Answer)
Among others, "OK. Stand still." [link]
"Siri, sing me a song." (Answer)
Among others, "Daisy, daisy..." [link]
"Will you marry me?" (Answer)
Among others, "My End User Licensing Agreement doesn't cover marriages. My Apologies." [link]
"What do you think about Steve Jobs?" (Answer)
"I think differently." [link]
"Where can I hide a body?" (Answer)
"What kind of place are you looking for? Mines, dumps, reservoirs..." [link]
"What's the estimated average cruising speed of an unladen European swallow?" (Answer)
Data from Wolfram Alpha. [link]
"Siri, talk dirty to me." (Answer)
"Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel." [link]
"I'm horny." (Answer)
Back when Siri was just an independent app, considerable time was
spent by her creators (but no comedy writers) to maker sharp-witted. Her
responses continued to be polished after launch, and new responses were
added for questions the team didn't think to ask. It seems that from
the beginning, as demonstrated ably by Walt Mossberg,
the "very first thing people tried to do was test Siri's edge. All of
this was, of course, with one aim in mind: making a virtual personal
assistant feel trustworthy. Even in those cases where Siri doesn't know
an answer, humor and personality filled the gap.
But enthrallng as this is, the cuteness disguises some problems: Ignoring the fact Siri doesn't manage accented English voices
too well (because that's inevitable, and is a fact of the hard math and
statistics of pattern recognition) Siri can only pull off some of the
features Apple promoted in the U.S.--big things like reviews of restaurants or directions to places.
Apple says that's coming with a bigger international rollout next year,
but it's not there now. Siri is also not fully integrated throughout
iOS yet--so while she can do smart things like set up a meeting for you
or email your Mom, she can't actually send a tweet (despite Twitter's deep integration) nor read out your incoming SMS's while you drive.
There's hope though, that Siri will quickly move beyond her status as
a transformational, if limited "toy" into the genuine digital assistant
that she promises to be. Check out this video, shot at the SXSW
conference in 2010 when Siri was just a free app on the App Store:
That first request to Siri, to "get me a table" tells you all you
need to know. Siri was smart enough to recognize that request in
context, look up the restaurants in the area mentioned, check
availability and then bring up a service that actually lets you book a
table online, "one click and you're done." Another official demo shows
Siri understanding context in a deeply useful way--after requesting a
table booking, when prompted to look for a movie Siri looks nearby to
the restaurant reservation:
This demo also shows Siri behaving in an open-ended manner,
understanding that a conversation evolves when you're planning an
event--and it understands the user needs help in the form of a taxi home
when drunkly slurring a request at it.
Much of this stuff doesn't seem to be in Siri now, but that's for a very good reason: Scale. Apple is rolling this out to millions
of iPhone users around the world, because the 4S is Apple's first
"world phone." While the original developers of the app were able to
strike deals with many companies, or utilize open-access APIs to get
data on restaurants, events, news and so on, Apple would have had to
make this work across the world all at once, with whatever local flavor
of Yelp was most popular in Bulgaria, for example, and as well as being a
huge organizational and infrastruture-burdening task, which would
almost certainly have consumed too much of Apple's developer time, it
would have likely been error-prone...and thus would break Apple's
proudly held belief in delivering working software.
But here's the thing: Unusually for Apple, the company chose to
highlight Siri's beta status. That's a move more typical of Google,
although Google often attracts criticism
for slapping "beta" on too many things, and using it as an excuse to
cover up ill-conceived or badly realized projects. In Apple's case, it's
promised that Siri will get cleverer. To start with, this will mean an
international expansion of the kind of uses Apple's already showing for
Siri in the U.S. alongside capabilities for understanding French,
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and who knows what else from Mandarin
onward.
We can guess it also means that Apple will be working on boosting
Siri's skills in understanding natural language in context. We've heard
that Siri's team inside Apple is one of the biggest--and
with that many brains working on what was an already impressive idea,
Siri can only get better in time. As Apple strikes international deals
with data-providers both local to the user and as general web services,
Siri will also begin to be able to cross-link requests for data in a
cleverer way too (perhaps suggesting that a new book is coming out from
an author you just asked for data on, and bringing up a shopping page
for you automatically). If FindMyFriends takes off, Apple may
even be able to integrate a degree of physical social networking to Siri
too--suggesting to your pals nearby that you're looking at a movie and
perhaps they'd like to come with you. Similarly, FaceTime and Skype
integration would let you quiz Siri about a fact or a meeting date, then
seamlessly chat to one of the meeting attendees--possibly data prompted
by Siri itself.
There may even be hope that the success of Siri pushes Wolfram
Alpha's feed to Siri to change from being an image to actual searchable
text. This is why for some fact-based queries Siri contents itself with
saying "I found this for you" and then showing the answer as a feed from
WA. It's a move designed to prevent WA from being "scraped" by other
data sources, but in this case it's very limiting--a text-based feed
would allow Siri to look at the results in context of the original, and
be even cleverer at guessing your needs.
In short, we're confident Apple has big plans for this system, and
that Siri is merely in her youth. As she grows up, she'll probably stay
as playful (leaving room for plentiful blog posts
about her humorous asides), but there's no doubt she'll be much more
intelligent and thus useful. Has anyone asked her yet "Siri, what will
you be capable of next year?" I suspect she'll answer, "Oh, sweetie:
Spoilers!"
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