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Comment by jentulman | Hacker News Reader

The question that springs to my mind is not 'how can I play with this?' but 'Are Apple bringing Siri to the desktop?', seeing as it appears there's nothing specific to the 4S hardware in how this works.

I'd quite like to be able to add calendar entries or tweet without moving to another application.

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Apple has clearly had a difficult time keeping up with early demand for Siri services as it is.

I think keeping it limited to the 4S looks a lot more like a operational necessity at this time.

Given that, If Siri appears on the Mac between major OS releases, I imagine it might be only for new hardware (i.e. a Macbook Air with an exterior Siri button and purple LED) at first as well.

Eventually (once they can scale Siri well enough), it could be released as a modestly-priced Mac App Store app. I bet it would be more pricy than FaceTime ($0.99 US) though.

I presume that's what they'll end up doing for existing iOS customers, pegging Siri for iPhone 4 and recent Touches at a price that keeps 4S customers satisfied to get early access and/or "free" Siri for the life of their phone.

> an exterior Siri button and purple LED

That's really gross, and exactly the kind of design choice Apple never makes.

Ha! Very true, I didn't even picture it and indeed I can't. I don't think they would actually put any Siri hardware features on a MacBook in the first place, so I went off the deep end there.

What makes you think thy've had a tough time scaling with early demand? I'd think that this scales horizontally pretty well, given that each request is largely stateless and there's no interaction between users.

> each request is largely stateless

Negative. Siri remembers the context of your conversation.

But according to this article, the server seems to only translate speech to text, with the whole natural language processing and AI happening on the device.

I'm talking about the Siri outages at peak times, which seem to have subsided for now but indicate that they weren't ready for even the demand they've had.

I think the 4S-specific hardware is the improved proximity detector. This allows you to raise the phone to your ear and speak to Siri instantly. I suspect the older phones' proximity sensor isn't fast enough to support that feature, so Apple figured they'd go 4S only. (It can't hurt that they sell more phones that way.)

Actually, Apple included an additional proximity detector to make sure Siri works when you bring the phone to ear. Here's iFixit report:

http://www.ifixit.com/blog/blog/2011/11/09/little-sister-sir...

This means that Siri won't provide optimum experience (pick the phone to ear and Siri is ready to take the command) for iPhone4 and older versions.

You can do that already, as long as you don't mind using your antiquated fingers to do so. Alfred[1] is my personal favorite, but Quicksilver[2] will do the job too (and is free).

[1] http://www.alfredapp.com/

[2] http://qsapp.com/index.php

Thank you, I'm actually a user and big fan of Alfred already, but I second your recommendation to everyone else.

But this is the future and I want my jetpack/siri :)

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