Siri 101
Siri being funny
I had my first encounter with Apple’s Siri last weekend. And I was impressed. I bet the record breaking sales of IPhone 4S can be largely attributed to the smooth talking, sassy Siri. With disregard to many of us bloggers who gave half hearted reviews to the IPhone 4S, Apple’s new phone has broken records and sold millions just after its launch. Trust Apple to re-invent an old technology and make it look cool so that a million followers instantly lap it up!
Back in the year 2010, Siri was just another free app on the IPhone. Apple acquired the company Siri Inc. that developed this app, in 2010. Sometime after Apple acquired the company, the app was pulled from the app store. In its new avatar, Siri comes back for the mass market as a speech-recognition computer application. It has both speech input and output, meaning you can speak to it, and it can speak back to you. Siri can take care of your appointments, do some number crunching, search something for you and maintain the same even temperament while ‘she’ does all that. And things will only get better as Apple keeps updating it. And she is funny! If you haven’t already caught on, here’s the one I tried-“Siri, will you marry me?” Siri’s response- “My End User Licensing Agreement does not cover marriage. My apologies.” See more Siri-ously funny ones here.
Great but not perfect
Here comes the downside. Remember I said I was skeptical of voice recognition technologies? As I had expected, and as has been widely reported, Siri has problems recognizing even slightly accented speech. I have the same wary feeling I get when people don’t get my name right even after repeating it several times. Maybe Siri and I just need to get to know each other better! The software doesn’t always understand what someone says, and it sometimes misunderstands the question. It won’t work if you are in a noisy environment. So you and Siri really have to find a quiet corner if you want to have a conversation. Also, it is useless if you don’t have a network connection. As of yesterday, thousands of users reported trouble connecting to Siri. The popularity of Siri means Apple needs to add more servers to keep up with the traffic. This is one problem I bet Apple wants to have. Apple has slapped the beta label on this version and so Siri will only get smarter as Apple engineers continue to update the phrases and responses. Also, the valuable data on the type of questions users are asking will continue to grow and as result, enrich Siri’s brain to make her answers fine-tuned and appropriate. The challenge for Apple is to make the technology sustainable and adaptable to international markets.
Not AI –not just yet
Wired magazine speculated whether Siri really counts as AI and the answer is, technically, no. Apple has an army of developers working on Siri and the answers you get from “her” are merely phrases that got put together using the words you provided and phrases that Apple engineers programmed. Your phone is not really “thinking” about those answers. But I daresay Siri opens up a lot of doors to bring intelligence to our devices and does it with aplomb. To end with another quip from the charming Siri, “Siri, you are so pretty” “Oh, Stop!”
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