Siri is an iPhone app that stands out as the only one of its kind—a virtual personal assistant. It basically finds things for you, and does things that you would normally do, using a variety of apps and websites. Of course, you could do that yourself, but by simply using your voice to make your request to Siri, it will do the work for you.
Siri uses a speech recognition engine that is highly accuracy and is smart enough to filter out background noise. Even with my neighbor’s pressure washer going full bore just a few yards away, I was able to get good results almost every time.
What’s nice is that you don’t have to pause between words; you can speak naturally. It does require that you enunciate clearly though, and for those who have no patience for speech recognition, you can always type your requests.
You don’t necessarily need to use standard English grammar either. For example, if you say “Take me drunk, I’m home,” it will respond by finding a taxi for you. You can ask a question in a variety of different ways and it has the intelligence to figure it out.
Siri seems to aim to make their iPhone app the first place you would go to look up anything. At the moment, their search engine is mostly concentrated on things centered on getting you out of your home. It looks up the weather for you, helps you find a taxi, or finds directions for you to local businesses. It can also help you make reservations for movies, events, and restaurants. I can already see some apps becoming redundant because of Siri.
Don’t mistake Siri for another simple search engine. It is able to understand some of the finer points of communication. For example, if you ask it “What is the temperature,” it responds with your current location and the exact temperature. But if you ask it “What is the weather forecast,” It may respond in natural language: “It looks like it’s going to be nice this weekend” and follows up with a detailed report.
A true personal assistant would also remind you of certain things or tasks that you need to attend to, and Siri makes it simple. For example, if you say “Remind me to put the cat out before bedtime,” it will respond with a notification form set for 9 p.m.. You can then confirm the time and date, and then save or cancel it. If you confirm, it will remind you later with an e-mail.
Siri is constantly improving its app and making alliances with more partners. Just recently it integrated WolframAlpha, a computational search engine, so that it can do calculations or look up statistics for you.
Siri can be somewhat slow to respond to requests, but overall it has a compelling technology on its hands. A few months ago, Siri was bought by Apple, and so its future as a company is uncertain, but its technology will likely live on in the iPhone in some way.
Siri is free.
[etRating value=“ 4”]
