Now that I have my new iPhone 4s, I have acquired my own personal assistant. Yes, the new iPhone comes with Siri. I can't give you all the technical mumbo-jumbo as to what Siri is but I CAN tell you in layman's terms that she (and I use the humanizing pronoun deliberately) is an artificial intelligence-type of program built into the new iPhone. You speak to her just like you would to a normal person and she answers you.
For example, to get the screen above, I pushed my home button and said, "Siri!"
She replied, "Yes, Dee?"
I said, "Do you think it is going to snow this week?"
You can see her answer on my phone's screen. Siri will do things like read incoming texts to you, write a text and send it for you, call people for you, set up reminders for you, pop up a map to show you how to get to a place you ask directions to, and even make recommendations for things like a good Indian restaurant.
That's only the tip of the iceberg. There's more she'll do. You can read all about Siri on Apple's website here. What I particularly like is that there was no tedious learning curve to use Siri. She was quite agreeable right from the start. I can remember the old PDA days when you had to "train" your device to recognize your voice and then train it to recognize your handwriting. Boy, have we come a long way, Baby!
Apple says that Siri will be able to do more and more amazing things as the months go by and more people use it. Now if this was a sci-fi movie, you might be getting a little twinge of foreshadowing right about now. Could Siri one day become too smart for her own good.....or for OUR own good? Ah, who knows? In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy having someone (or something) at my beck and call who does what I want when I want them to do it. Besides, I'm notoriously bad at typing on these little phone keyboards and it's incredibly nice to be able to just say a message and have it show up in email or text format.
"You're kidding, right?"
1 comment:
Wow, that is amazing.
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