Posts tagged Siri

What doesn’t scare me about Siri

My friend Joseph Dworak talks about getting an iPhone with Siri and responds to those who are scared about technology taking over our lives:

Technology does not scare me, lack of boundaries does.

So true. The question to always hold in our minds is this: is technology serving us or are we serving it?

Might Siri impact how we talk to each other?

Adam Lisagor:

As we learn to speak to Siri, we’ll learn more about how we formulate ideas into words, how to express those so that they may be understood with less margin of error, ultimately shortening the gap between intention and comprehension.

It’s safe to assume that as we learn to talk to Siri, Siri learns to listen to us. So we’re not simply assimilating with the robot culture, we’re fostering a new understanding between our vastly different types of intelligence.

Which is to say, Siri will teach us how to talk to Siri but maybe more importantly, how to talk to each other.

Fascinating idea.

Voice recognition: Which smartphone is the best listener?

Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC technology correspondent, tests out voice recognition on the new iPhone 4S and compares it with the voice recognition that comes with Android:

Both systems are far from perfect. But Android, which was far better than Apple’s old Voice Control system, now appears to have been leap-frogged by Siri.

To be clear, this is a major understatement by Rory. The results from Siri in the test he did were significantly better than what he got from Android via a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Why Siri is another example of Apple getting something right that competitors consistently fail to

MG Siegler writing about ‘Siri’, Apple’s new intelligent assistant that comes with the iPhone 4S:

Google’s voice search and Siri may look comparable on paper. But in reality, one is something best used by a robot, the other is something best used by a human. And robots don’t buy phones — at least not yet.

In the bigger picture, this is something that Apple seems to understand time and time again that their rivals do not. Technology is an ever-important part of everyones’ lives, but the only way to make it truly accessible to the vast majority of users is to humanize it. That’s Siri. Google, Microsoft, etc — they all fail miserably at doing this.

I’m sure in a few weeks, we’re going to see Google come out and say, “wait, but look, we can do all of the stuff Siri can do too!” They’ll tweak their voice recognition to pick up more human phrases, etc. But it won’t matter. They already lost the mindshare battle. Yes, Android had better voice controls first, but if you ask anyone on the street right now which is the phone with the awesome voice controls, they’ll tell you it’s the iPhone.

The whole article is well worth the read. And MG Siegler is spot on in his analysis that Apple have managed to yet again take a technology and make it relevant the masses by humanising it.

iPhone 4S, Siri and iCloud: what you need to know

This is a really nice breakdown of what Apple is bringing to the table in terms of both hardware and software.