Siri in practice

To me, the main shortcomings, at the moment, as a UK customer, are the male voice (seriously... I want the nicer american female voice... it subconsciously annoys me to think of "Siri" as a British male) and, perhaps more importantly, the fact that Siri won't connect to Yell/GMaps/etc in the UK yet, so I can't emerge out of the tube and ask "How do I get to 123 Some Street?" and be presented with a map. I'm not quite sure why that doesn't work in the UK - surely, the interfaces to Google Maps and even Yell don't differ by country.

Despite those, it is already very useful. I'm using the timer all the time ("Set a timer for 3 minutes", "Wake me up in 20 minutes", "Wake me up at 7am tomorrow"), and the weather ("What's the weather like tomorrow?"), and using it to set meetings ("Add event 'drinks with Enrico' at 6pm on Friday").

The real killer, imho, will be the integration with services. The voice recognition seems good enough, the "parsing what you mean" could be improved but is good enough. What makes or breaks Siri is the integration with services. The timer/reminders/calendar integration is extremely smooth and so it is great and a huge help. Bits that aren't integrated (e.g. Twitter) or less well integrated (e.g. sending SMS's), less so.

All in all, a great start, and useful from day one, though, like all new Apple products, there's plenty of room for improvement. I'm waiting to see where they take it - unlike some other companies, Apple do have a reputation for relentlessly pushing forward after releasing an initial, "it doesn't do much but it does it well" device.

If you set up the phonetic first and last name, Siri will pick up on them the next time your data is shipped off to Apple (yes, your data exists in the cloud when using Siri), also, I have set nicknames for certain friends, and saying "Call <nickname>" works exactly as one would expect. This is a killer feature, I have nicknamed my dad, my step-mom, and various other people so that Siri knows to call my Dad when I ask it to.

I've already gotten better at asking Siri questions, yes it may seem unnatural at first, but overall the benefit I gain from using a little less natural language is enough for me.

I've had my new iPhone 4S for all of one day now, and it remains to be seen if I will continue to use Siri, but this morning when I woke up and couldn't find my glasses I was still able to find out what my boss texted me about, send him a reply and all of this using my voice. That is fantastic and I absolutely love it.

My biggest issue is that my wife's name is "April" every time I say something like "call April" or "text April" it try's to set a reminder for April 1st.

It is all a matter of how useful it is already. If it is already much better than using the normal touch interface in many cases, the technology will evolve a lot in some way. There will be more users willing to pay for it, more competitors, and so forth. I really hope for this to happen.

On the other hand, if it is not good enough to be an improvement over the normal touch interface it will likely not be very used if not to show it to your friends for the first months. Next phone you buy you'll not care if it has or not that feature (unless somebody else or newer iPhones will be able to improve it a lot), and the technology will hardly evolve.

I don't still know as I don't have an iPhone 4s, and stories I read still can't tell me if it is going to be used a lot or not. Also in the specific case of Italian, I guess the at least the recognition can be near perfect as Italian is a lot simpler than English to turn into text (probably simpler than any other language given that things are spoken exactly as they are read). But then the interpretation I guess will pose very similar problems, with the disadvantage of not being a mainstream language.

One thing I'll say for Siri: a few months ago I had an idea for a dictaphone device with a calendar function and voice recognition. As we know voice recognition is notoriously unreliable, but I figured it could be heavily optimized for the lingual subset necessary for setting appointments/reminders. I think that would be extremely useful to people with bad memories (eg. many elderly people), or lots to keep track of. Everyone I mentioned this to thought it was a great idea.

Looks like Siri does precisely that.

I've been using Siri as a utility and for entertainment for the past 48 hours.

It's incredibly useful especially when driving. I've plugged my iphone into my car stereo and have been using Siri to get directions, recommendations, play music and to compose messages. I'm able to get work done now while driving and Im doing so safely.

The success rate that she understands me (im not speaking into a ear/mic piece rather it's speaker phone like) is about 80%.

The only thing I have found to be a learning curve and source of frustration is composing messages. You really need to think of exactly what you want to say before speaking it. Also, you need to speak proper punctuation at the end of each sentence, like "Do you want to get food <question mark>" "We can meet at Applebees <period>".

This learning curve may turn some people off, though maybe others won't face a similar challenge? Either way I have found Siri to be enjoyably useful!

It's most valuable feature is the novelness of it - it is likely being used by over a million people right now. I assume that Apple is tracking result click-throughs to guess when Siri is providing (or actually, not providing) the right answer to your query. This should mean it'll become exponentially better over time.

Having now actually used it, I've got to say it's pretty impressive, especially for location based searches ("Where's the best steak in town?" got me a load of steak restaurants, whether or not their the best is probably another matter, but I was impressed none the less).

Tell it, "I love you Siri". The response made me smile.

today i learned that windows seven can do speech recognition. I wrote this comment with it but it took me five minutes.

Unfortunately, the English (Australia) recognition is infuriatingly bad.

It works okay (75%) for built in commands, but anything to do with transcription (messages etc) is about 50/50. And that's really not good enough for a shipping product.

I noticed the new address book has entries for phonetic first/last names (use the Add Field). I assume those are used by Siri (just like the Related People fields) and would solve your name problem.

For things like names, has anyone tried using the "Phonetic First/Last Name" field in their address book? I suspect it's there for reasons like this.

We've been down this road before with both the Newton and the Palm Pilot. The Palm couldn't properly recognize text at all, and so its users learned a custom form of hieroglyphics in order to use it. The newton had some trouble with particular letters in particular handwriting --where really the letter isn't properly formed at all, but humans are able to get it with more context than the recognizer. A slight change, like better writing, resolved the issue.

So, users will adjust to Siri some.

At the same time, whenever Apple introduces a new technology, it is always lacking in some area. Apple limits the breadth and polishes what it does ship to as high a degree as they possibly can... and then extends it over time. Siri doesn't work in all languages or all places right now.

Apple's always extending, and unless the initial version is so useless that it has no adoption, over time Siri will get better and we'll adjust.

The real question is, whether Siri is useful enough now to use regularly... or if it will be a passing fad, soon forgotten.

Siri is a game changer. Wait for siri-enabled apps in the future.

Siri is saving me from a lot of typing while driving.