Sitting Down with Siri

When the iPhone 3GS came out two years ago, one touted feature was voice control. It allowed for rudimentary control of your music and to call people on command. With the newly released 4S, Apple’s gone beyond that by adding Siri, who’s practically a personal assistant at your beck and call.

Apple makes a pretty grandiose claim that you just need to talk to Siri, and she’ll understand you and do/find what you ask. But does she really do just about anything? I spent a ton of time this weekend finding out.

Siri does a lot of things exceptionally well, including things you might not expect:

• Encyclopedia Brown – Ask her a ‘what is/who is x’ question and she’ll kick back an answer, provided x would be an encyclopedia entry, formatted as a table to the specific type of term it is; constellations, chemicals, people, and more all get their own treatment, utilizing Wolfram Alpha. She at times can accomodate more granular questions, but it's hit or miss. A query to find the Best Picture winner from a particular year gets an answer; a request to find who’s thrown the most NFL touchdowns does not, though the mini bio provided when you ask who Bret Favre is indicates he’s the only person to throw over 500 touchdowns. But then, “what is the chemical formula of nitrous oxide” does get an answer. Never fear, though, as whenever she fails, she offers to do a web search, still quickly getting what you want.
• Noah Webster – Say “what is the definition of x?” and she’ll kick back a dictionary response.
• Albert Einstein – You expect her to calculate “what is 17 x 8?” You might not expect her to answer “what is the volume of a cylinder with a radius of 6 inches and a height of 9 inches?” But she does, and does she ever, giving the answer (expressed both in terms of pi and the full calculation), a visual representation, conversions to several other measures, and comparative volumes to give extra meaning to her answer. Whatever you want, if you know the inputs required she’ll handle all manner of mathematic and scientific formulas, from areas and integrals to work calculated in joules and the Ideal Gas Law. For those with nerdish leanings, this is endlessly fun.
• Hurricane Schwartz – Ask "what's the temperature?" or "will it be chilly this weekend?" or "do I need an umbrella today?" and be prepared to be amazed.
• I don’t do metric – But luckily, Siri does. Ask “how many inches are in a meter?” or “how many miles is five kilometers” and she happily converts those and other measures for you. Even ever-changing monetary conversions are a snap, as “how many dollars is a British pound?” gets the right result, along with a few conversions you didn't ask for, almost as if to say "look what I can do!"
• What are you in the mood for? – She finds restaurants — lots of them. “Where’s a Chinese restaurant?”, “Is there a Chinese place nearby?”, or even “I want Chinese food” all get a list generated for you.
• Can I get there from here? – Saying “I need directions to x” gets you tossed to Google maps, though Siri often makes you confirm between a list of locations before doing so. She can also check the traffic for you.

Siri lets you control your iPhone in a host of awesome new ways:

• Name that Tune – The old voice control let you play an artist, album, or playlist; Siri takes it a step further, allowing you to request a specific song to be played, as well as albums to be played shuffled. If you have two songs of the same name, asking to “play ‘America’ by Neil Diamond” or “play ‘America’ by Simon & Garfunkel” gets the right one.
• I’ll be right there! – You can send texts without ever touching a key. Ask to send a text to a person, dictate your message, and say “send” at the confirm screen. You can also respond to texts much the same. Very impressive.
• Wake Me Up before You Go-Go – You can set alarms as a fixed time (“set an alarm for 6:00 tomorrow morning”) or as a time offset (“wake me up in two hours”). Similar requests to set short timers or add a meeting to your calendar also work.

Siri has some odd quirks and head-scratching missing functionality:

• Would you like fries with that? – Siri is only as good as the database holding the information she uses. I tried asking about going to McDonald’s using several different phrasings, yet for some reason only once did the McDonald’s less than a half-mile from where I live show up on the list — very odd.
• Oh, the weather outside is frightful – Siri seems determined to answer with the weather whenever she can. A “how many degrees Fahrenheit is 100 degrees Celsius?” request got an answer of “I can only provide the weather for the next 12 hours.” A simple request of “what are tornadoes?” got back “There are no tornadoes in the area.”
• Fail Whale – Siri’s most perplexing failure comes with Twitter. This phone: texts without a keyboard; now allows you to easily tweet photos, videos, and places from within the packed-in apps; allows for voice input off the keyboard at all times. Yet, a command of “I’d like to post a tweet” gets back, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you with Twitter.” She’s smart enough to know what you want, but not able to carry out this fairly simple request, and that’s the sole time I felt any disappointment.

Siri likes being talked to a certain way:

While Siri is supposed to adapt to your speech over time, some may not want to wait for that. The key to successful initial interactions is to look at the top of any table, which is “Input Interpretation.” I learned this lesson by asking for the area of a rectangle with sides of six and eight inches, having less than stellar success; when it finally succeeded, I noticed the interpretation used height and width. I switched to asking using those terms and have had no problems ever since.

And the same goes for any other command or request. Once you learn what Siri likes to hear by looking at synonyms in the input interpretations, you’ve got her in the palm of your hand.

It’s worth noting that if Siri mishears you, it’s possible to tap the bubble containing your speech and manually type over incorrect words. She’ll automatically re-run your request when you’re done typing.

You can also try to engage her in conversation, flirt, compliment, curse or ask opinions. Of course, Apple planned for all that and handles it in pretty nifty ways, but I’ll let you discover those for yourselves.

I’ll close by noting that none of her failures truly diminish my enjoyment of discovering all Siri is capable of doing. There’s special joy to be taken from having her correctly do something you didn’t expect her to do, think ‘I wonder if she’ll do this other thing?’ that seems even more out there, and get yet another success.

But what’s most impressive of all about this? Siri, while released as a launch component on the 4S, is still considered to be in beta. How great will the ‘real’ version be—and what might a 2.0 version be able to do?

iPhone 4S is currently available in Apple Stores and select retail partners.

Jeff is currently in love with his iPhone 4S (and Siri); follow him on Twitter at JKLugar.