Last month I shared my thoughts on “How to talk to Siri the right way,” the idea being to better understand — and work around — some of Apple’s voice assistant’s limitations.

With the arrival of iOS 7, however, we’ve got a smarter, more capable gal Friday (or, if you’ve changed Siri’s voice, guy Friday). Here are seven new tricks Siri has learned and how to use them.

1. Change your settings

(Credit: Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET)

Although the new Control Center makes it simple to toggle settings like Airplane Mode, Bluetooth, and screen brightness, Siri can now handle these kinds of settings as well. It’s a simple matter of saying, “Turn on Bluetooth,” or the like.

Even better, if there’s a setting you want but don’t know where to find, let Siri take you there. Say something like “change font size” and you’ll land at exactly the right Settings menu.

2. Train her to recognize unusual names

Is Siri constantly mangling the name of a friend or co-worker (like that “Broida” character)? Gone are the days of manually tweaking “phonetic name” pronunciations; now you just train Siri so she always gets it right.

All you do is say “pronounce [person's name],” then follow the steps through a simple learning procedure.

3. Do more with Twitter

(Credit: Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET)

Siri used to have fairly basic Twitter integration, but now she’s totally up on what’s trending.

In fact, you can ask things like, “What’s trending on Twitter?”, “What’s cheapskateblog saying?” (or any person/company/handle), or “Search Twitter for hash tag [whatever].” Queries like these will return Twitter-centric results.

4. Choose your search engine

Siri still manages to bungle certain searches if you don’t prefix them properly.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET)

For better or worse, Microsoft’s Bing is now the default Siri search engine. (The implementation can still be screwy, though. If you say “Mount Everest” or “search for Mount Everest,” you’ll get, shockingly, nothing. You have to say “search the Web for Mount Everest.”)

However, you can also prefix your request with “search Google for” or “search Wikipedia for,” and Siri will give you the corresponding results — though using the former will bounce you into Safari rather than listing the results in Siri’s own little page.

5. Read your e-mail

As I recall, if you asked old Siri if you had any new e-mail messages, she could tell you. New Siri can actually start reading those new messages to you if you say, “Read my e-mail.” You’ll hear the sender’s name, the date/time of the message, and the subject line.

You can also say “read my latest e-mail” or “Do I have e-mail from [person]?”, the latter helpful for checking in on messages from, say, your spouse or boss.

If you want the full message, just tap the onscreen preview to open up Mail proper. Or, better yet, say “Read the [number in the list] one,” as in, “Read the third one.”

6. Turn off navigation

(Credit: Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET)

Apple Maps can get you where you need to go (most of the time), but if you’ve reached a familiar part of your route (like when you’re on your way home) and no longer need battery-draining GPS assistance, just tell Siri to “cancel navigation.”

7. Play iTunes Radio

In the mood for a little Daft Punk? Maybe some adult alternative? Siri has her finger on the iTunes Radio dial. You can ask for an artist or station and she’ll queue it right up. The syntax: “Play iTunes Radio Daft Punk.” “Play iTunes Radio adult alternative.” And so on.

Have you found any other new Siri tricks worth sharing? Let’s hear about them in the comments!

Credits: Rick Broida

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First – what I feared; we’ve all seen Minority Report. Somehow I thought that Google Glass would be some combination of virtual reality and augmented reality – knowing who I am,  where I am, and who I’m talking to.  I feared that somehow I’d lose privacy.

Then, I feared being self conscious about wearing them. Would I stand out? Would I be a geek? Would people stop me on the street.

So,  now – the results.

First, Google Glass is a remarkable piece of first generation technology. The design is elegant, comfortable, and solid.  It feels like a well thought through piece of technology. I suspect the product that makes its way to the market won’t be remarkably different than this one. Let me break it down:

The Screen. The images hover just above your eye, within your peripheral vision, but not in front of your gaze.  This is how it should be.  It’s there, but not intrusive.  The screen is easy to read, and easy to navigate.

Navigation: Perhaps the thing I didn’t expect was the ‘swipeable’ touch sensitive side of the glass – across the temple on the right side. Front, back, up, down are all motions the Glass understands. Making navigation through pages a breeze. There’s a single button top right. One click snaps a picture. A longer hold starts a video. That’s it for navigation. Simple and easy to understand.

The Audio.  Ok, this is almost magical. The ‘speakers’ are actually silent, they transmit sound through the bones in your ears. Google glass uses “bone conduction” to create sound. The technology  sends vibrations to the inner ear via your skull. It’s wild. Hard to explain but remarkably workable – and helps with safety. It allows the wearers to hear the noise in the environment – so rather than filter out what’s around you it allows you to remain connected and aware.

The Camera.  As someone who’s spent a good deal of time lugging gear around, I have to say I wasn’t expecting much here. While DSLR’s make great pictures, and video cameras are bulky – the Google Glass lens seems to manage to make crisp sharp pictures and remarkable HD video with almost no weight or size. There’s an audio mike on it too -but I couldn’t find it. The camera is a 5MP that can shoot video at 720p.

The Cloud Connection. There’s 12GB of flash memory available for storage,  but it seems to hardly matter. As long as your Glass is connected to the web via WiFi or Bluetooth, the pictures and video automatically uploaded to a private folder on your G+ account.  This means you should never run out of memory – and never lose content. In practice I did have one set of videos go missing, not sure why – alpha bug I’m sure.

Now, on to the experience itself. While people did notice them – the response was almost entirely positive. One woman in an elevator did recoil in fear, but otherwise lots of curious folks who wanted to learn more.  I took them to a Radio Shack,  and the Apple AAPL -0.21% Store, even a Game Stop.  The only place it didn’t spark a conversation was at Best Buy BBY +2.56% – go figure.

But overall,  I found myself using them a good deal. The voice recognition is remarkably good – so its easy to respond to texts and emails. While you may not think of it at first, clearly Google Glass is a head on competitor to Apple’s Siri.  And Google NOW helps as well – pushing timely and topical information. I’d like it to be location aware too – but that’s just a matter of time.

After a week with Google Glass – there’s a ton of video to share. My 15 year old son took Google Glass on a sailing expedition on the Hudson. His video may reflect the power of Google Glass better than anything I can say.

http://www.worldmadeofglass.com/video/Hudson-River-Saliling-School-ed

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That’s because your voice commands are being transferred to Siri’s brain, which is online in the cloud, before an answer is delivered back to you.

But 9to5Mac believes Apple is working on a fix that could make Siri much faster. The site reports:

Apple is testing a local, offline version of Dictation voice input for iOS devices, according to strings of code found inside of the iOS 7 beta.

… While we do not have evidence of this, it seems plausible that Apple could eventually port over this technology from Dictation to Siri. This would allow certain queries to Siri to take place at a quicker pace.

That could be huge for Siri in its fight with Google Now, the voice-command system on Android phones which often delivers more accurate results than Siri does.

The post Apple May Have Figured Out How To Fix Siri So That You’ll Actually Want To Use It! appeared first on Siri Wiki.

Sure, we’ve heard rumors of some new features here and there, but so far nothing groundbreaking. There are already posts out there telling the world they should temper their expectations, and that’s probably a good thing. You don’t want to get yourself all riled up for no reason, right?

Our own Anna Scantlin posted her pre-WWDC iOS 7 expectations, and I have to say that I agree with her outlook. The truth is, even if WWDC is all about changing the way iOS looks, I’ll be okay with that. I don’t have any huge problems with the way that iOS functions, even if I do think they could ease up on their whole “One Ecosystem” rule. I think if the crew at Apple want to put the big focus on finally redesigning iOS, then they deserve the attention. Because iOS deserves to be aesthetically altered.

So, while I’m okay with how iOS works “generally,” I do have some questions about the future version of Apple’s mobile software. Questions, usually, that I’ve whittled down to just one feature: Siri.

Right now, Siri is just okay. Last year I admitted that I was using Siri way more than I ever thought I would, but the truth is I’ve all but completely stopped. And while I think I would have stopped using it anyway, eventually, I’m okay with admitting that I’ve stopped using it because I just prefer Google Now.

And, here’s the thing: I don’t even use it on iOS. I think it’s a cool idea, but the limitation to not have it actually notify me of things severely limits the attraction for the app. For me, at least. I still have it installed, and I still check it from time to time, but you really do get to see how great Google Now is on Android, and why Siri pales in comparison.

But since Google Now is on my phone in general, and I do have access to it when I want it –even without its precognitive abilities– I’ve just given up on Siri altogether. Plus, being able to open Google Maps from within Google Search is just amazing. I know I’ve made it clear that I love, almost depend, on Google’s apps on my iPhone, but Google’s just making it easier.

Which is why I wonder if Apple is either going to put a huge focus on Siri, and just give her a whole suite of new features, or if they’re going to let the software just tread water and fade into the night. With Google Now actually present on iOS, I hope it’s the former of the two options, because I’d like to see Apple truly revolutionize the software, and pack it with accessible information, maybe from iCloud.

Oh, and I want Siri to be able to control third-party applications, like Spotify. That’d be great. I hate when she tells me, almost sarcastically, that she can’t skip to the next song because I’m “not playing any music.” Hey, Siri? Don’t argue with me. Geez.

So tell me what you think they are going to do with Siri. Do you even think it’s a good enough feature to warrant any new attention? Or do you think Apple will just hope users are okay with more advanced voice commands? Do you think Siri can eventually compete with Google Now? Let me know!
Credits: Evan Selleck – Contributing Editor
@PhoneDog_Evan

The post Will Siri ever really compete with Google Now? appeared first on Siri Wiki.

The new functionality, which has already reached the web-based version, allows users to speak search queries by hitting the microphone icon that rests above the iOS keyboard.

Google’s Knowledge Graph will provide the answers users seek, which can be from questions related to the weather, sports scores, movie listings and everything in between, by speaking them back directly.

Enhanced voice search had already been included in a recent update for the Google Search app for iOS, but now it has reached version 27 of Chrome for mobile devices too.

As part of the update Google also brings faster voice recognition, with “text streamed on the fly” rather than waiting until the sentence or question has been spoken in full. The company demonstrated this tech to great effect at Google I/O.

Of course, the inclusion of voice search using Google’s powerful algorithms, gives Apple’s own Siri app a competitor on its very own turf.

Apple users can ask questions of their iOS device by double tapping the home button to bring up a microphone and it’ll be interesting to see which solution users prefer.

Apple has, in recent years, attempted to reduce Google’s influence on the iPhone and iPad, but a series of improvements and standalone apps have made Google’s suite essential for most users.

Other improvements added to Chrome today include faster page reloading, which Google says comes even “when the network is slow or unavailable”

You can download the update from the App Store now, while you can also see how the feature works within the Google Search app for iOS in the video below.

http://youtu.be/n2ZUSPecPRk

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As I wrote in a recent article on deep learning neural networks, the technology tries to emulate the way layers of neurons in the human neocortex recognize patterns and ultimately engage in what we call thinking. Improvements in mathematical formulas coupled with the rise of powerful networks of computers are helping machines get noticeably closer to humans in their ability to recognize speech and images.

Google Fellow Jeff Dean

Making the most of Google’s vast network of computers has been Dean’s specialty since he joined Google an almost inconceivable 14 years ago, when the company employed only 20 people. He helped create a programming tool called MapReduce that allowed software developers to process massive amounts of data across many computers, as well as BigTable, a distributed storage system that can handle millions of gigabytes of data (known in technical terms as “bazillions.”) Although conceptual breakthroughs in neural networks have a huge role in deep learning’s success, sheer computer power is what has made deep learning practical in a Big Data world.

Dean’s extreme geekitude showed in a recent interview, when he gamely tried to help me understand how deep learning works, in much more detail than most of you will ever want to know. Nonetheless, I’ll warn you that some of this edited interview still gets pretty deep, as it were. Even more than the work of Ray Kurzweil, who joined Google recently to improve the ability of computers to understand natural language, Dean’s work is focused on more basic advances in how to use smart computer and network design to make AI more effective, not on the application to advertising.

Still, Google voice search seems certain to change the way most people find things, including products. So it won’t hurt for marketers and users alike to understand a bit more about how this technology will transform marketing, which after all boils down to how to connect people with products and services they’re looking for. Here’s a deeply edited version of our conversation:

Q: What is deep learning?

A: It’s a form of machine learning where the system automatically learns which features are important in deciding, for example, if an image contains a cat or not. Before, a human might sit down and write code to generate a feature that they think is important, like if I’m trying to detect cats in images, I might write a whisker detector. So I write some code that I think will characterize whether there are whiskers in this picture. Then I might write an ear detector or things like that. These things take a lot of time to develop.

Q: What’s “deep” about deep learning?

A: “Deep” typically refers to the fact that you have many layers of neurons in neural networks. It’s been very hard to train networks with many layers. In the last five years, people have come up with techniques that allow training of networks with more layers than, say, three. So in a sense it’s trying to model how human neurons respond to stimuli.

We’re trying to model not at the detailed molecular level, but abstractly we understand there are these lower-level neurons that construct very primitive features, and as you go higher up in the network, it’s learning more and more complicated features.

Q: What has happened in the last five years to make deep learning a more widely used technique?

A: In the last few years, people have figured out how to do layer-by-layer pre-training [of the neural network]. So you can train much deeper networks than was possible before. The second thing is the use of unsupervised training, so you can actually feed it any image you have, even if you don’t know what’s in it. That really expands the set of data you can consider because now, it’s any image you get your hands on, not just one where you have a true label of what that image is [such as an image you know is a cheetah].

The third thing is just more computational power. These techniques work best when you can give them lots of data and you can train a big enough model where it has enough representational capacity to learn a really broad set of features from all the data you’re giving it. If you pass a lot of data through a teeny network, like 20 neurons, it’ll do what it can, but it’s not going to be very good. You really tens or hundreds of thousands of neurons in your model for a general image classification system before it can capture all the subtleties in all the different kinds of images.

Q: How does this approach fit into the pantheon of artificial intelligence techniques? Is it an alternative to other methods or an addition?

A: The key thing that it does that a lot of other methods don’t is that it automatically builds higher-level features from very raw inputs. You don’t necessarily have to figure out as a human what features are going to be most important. It’s hard as a human, for example, to figure out what components would make a “psss” sound. And it’s very hard to do that in all kinds of different noise conditions. Like if I’m in a subway stop and I go “psss,” there’s all kinds of background noise going on if am I holding the phone here or here.

With enough training data, you get enough people making that noise in a wide variety of conditions that the system will learn good detectors for all those different kinds of conditions it’s been exposed to. If you have someone with a Southern accent or a non-English speaker, and if you have enough information in your training data, the system can learn to pick up on that without any programmers having to be involved in writing an accent changer or writing code to deal with that.

Q: How much of an improvement can deep learning provide ultimately? For instance, your deep learning network doubled the rate of images that could be identified in Google’s  experiment last year in which the system could recognize cat images, but overall the identification rate was pretty low. What’s the significance of that?

A: One thing is that that’s a very large number of categories. If you have a much smaller number of categories, the accuracy goes up a lot. So if you go to a thousand categories, you get to above 50% accuracy. I can give you a sense of how difficult this is. This [image database that Google used in its experiment] has 21,000 categories in it, and, for example, you have to distinguish a thorny skate [fish] from a little skate from a gray skate from a devil ray. That’s a pretty hard task. So the accuracy is low, but I don’t think human accuracy on that test would be anywhere near 100%.

Q: What advances has Google in particular made in this area?

A: We’ve really pushed on being able to scale these systems to train much larger models–more neurons, more connections–and also train on much larger data sets. The combination of those two things is important. If you train on much more data but you have a small model, that extra data is not all that useful because the model can’t take advantage of it because it doesn’t have enough extra neurons in it to deal with it.

We are willing to deal with models where different pieces of the model reside on different machines. We essentially can partition these models so this might be on one machine, this might be on another machine.

The second thing that we do is in addition to having a single copy of the model spread out over a lot of machines, we’ll actually stamp out multiple copies of that, and they all sort of collaborate and process different input data and exchange their parameters every so often. That scale is pretty important because the more data you can expose your model to and the more neurons  you have in it, the better off you’ll be.

Q: How do you get these advances out into products?

A: Sometimes we build general pieces of functionality that teams can then apply to their own problems. So for example, for this image processing that we’ve been doing for general images, we have a group doing optical character recognition, which is a more specialized problem, but they were able to take some of this stuff and apply it to their particular problem. They had one or two people build a prototype that seemed to work.

Often a few people on the product team see the stuff we’ve done and they said we should try it on our problem, and they collaborate with us. All the speech work we’ve been doing is a collaboration between our group, which is working on general training infrastructure for these kinds of models, and the speech group, applying these kinds of models.

Q: How did the speech group apply your work to their products?

A: They replaced the acoustic model of speech, going from the raw audio waveform to the sequence of phonemes. They essentially divide speech into two parts, that part and the part that goes from a sequence of phonemes into what are actually the likely words that were uttered. So the part that got replaced was the acoustic model, the “Gaussian Mixture Model.” That got replaced with a deep learning model.

Q: So that was a big change in how speech recognition is done?

A: GMMs had been what state-of-the-art speech recognition systems used for years and years. And it’s only in the last three or four years that this neural net-based acoustic model has been able to get enough computational power and large data sets to train it where it’s now significantly better than the Gaussian Mixture Model.

Q: How long had your team in research been working on what got into the new speech recognition?

A: We started working on it about nine months before it got released.

Q: When might the image research work its way into actual products?

A: I don’t think we have anything concrete to announce at this point, but we’re definitely looking at a bunch of different places within different products that we can use it. My sense is that it will eventually be deployed in lots of different places. It’s not like it will be a new product, but integrated into a lot of other image-related products.

Q: Beyond specific products, why is all this important?

A: Traditionally computers have not been that good at interacting with people in ways that people feel natural interacting with. For example, speech recognition has only recently gotten significantly better. Doing general large-vocabulary speech recognition without these controlled scenarios–say “one” to do this, etc.–it really opens up possibilities for new kinds of user interfaces. The speech recognition is now good enough that I dictate emails on my phone rather than type them in. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough that it changes how I interact with my phone. Doing queries by voice is very natural now because it’s not frustrating. It usually does it right.

The same is true of image recognition. Computers don’t usually have a sense of if you have a picture of something what is in that image. And if we can do a good job of understanding what is in an image, that can bring along a lot of new things you can do in applications. If you’re able to give computer models so they can do a good job of perception like speech processing and image processing, that will be a pretty dramatic shift in a lot of areas.

Q: Any other applications?

A: Translation is another example where these kinds of models can help. It’s not hard to envision a mode where you look at something in an image and it shows you the English language equivalent as you’re looking at it. Maybe it shows you the French equivalent too.
Credits: http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/05/01/meet-the-guy-who-helped-google-beat-apples-siri/

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First off, you won’t get complete control over Spotify with this workaround, but it does make it so you don’t have to look down at the screen and peck out letters when you’re driving. Here’s what to do:

1. Tell Siri to send a text message to (603) 821-4328 (you can enter this number in your phone as something like

   “Spotify” to make it easier).

2. Say the artist name (and nothing else) and send that text message.
3. Wait a couple seconds and you’ll get a text message with a link to open the artist in Spotify.

It’s obviously not a perfect solution, but it makes it so you’re only looking and tapping on your iPhone once instead of several times. If you want to integrate it with your own number, the

source code is on GitHub. Of course, if you’re jailbroken you can integrate Spotify directly into Siri with a tweak like AssistantEnhancer.

Not-So-Secret Phone Number Introduces Siri to Spotify | Evolver.fm

Credits: Thorin Klosowski : Lifehacker.com

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It understands what you say. And knows what you mean.

Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like “Tell my wife I’m running late” or “Remind me to call the vet.” Siri not only understands what you say, it’s smart enough to know what you mean. So when you ask “Any good burger joints around here?” Siri will reply “I found a number of burger restaurants near you.” Then you can say “Hmm. How about tacos?” Siri remembers that you just asked about restaurants, so it will look for Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood. And Siri is proactive, so it will question you until it finds what you’re looking for.

It helps you do the things you do every day.

Siri makes everyday tasks less tasking. It figures out which apps to use for which requests, and it finds answers to queries through sources like Yelp and WolframAlpha. It plays the songs you want to hear, gives you directions, wakes you up, even tells you the score of last night’s game. All you have to do is ask.

Know the score. :Ask Siri for baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer scores as well as schedules, rosters, and stats.
Choose a movie: Ask Siri to get showtimes, buy tickets from Fandango, look up movie facts, play trailers, show you reviews, and more.
Find a restaurant. Ask Siri to search by different criteria or a combination. Siri gets you photos, reviews, and reservations.

iOS takes dictation.

Here’s another amazing way to get things done: just use your voice. Instead of typing, tap the microphone icon on the keyboard. Then say what you want to say and Siri listens. Tap Done, and your words are converted to text. Use dictation to write messages, take notes, search the web, and more. Dictation also works with third-party apps, so you can update your Facebook status, tweet, or write and send Instagrams.

Eyes free.

Apple is working with car manufacturers to integrate Siri into select voice control systems. Through the voice command button on your steering wheel, you’ll be able to ask Siri questions without taking your eyes off the road. To minimize distractions even more, your iOS device’s screen won’t light up. With the Eyes Free feature, ask Siri to call people, select and play music, hear and compose text messages, use Maps and get directions, read your notifications, find calendar information, add reminders, and more. It’s just another way Siri helps you get things done, even when you’re behind the wheel.

Credits : www.apple.com

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A long time ago, I made a pact with Apple: “You can control my entire technological life, from my computer to my phone to my stereo. I’ll pay premium prices. I’ll dive into your product ecosystem, and buy books and music and movies and apps from you. Even though they won’t work on devices made by anybody else.”

In exchange for surrendering control and submitting to that heftier price tag, I expect Apple products to simply work. That’s all. If you use Apple products, I suspect you made a similar bargain.

And so when I first saw the ads for Siri, I expected something remarkable, like I always do with Apple products. The first true consumer-grade AI. Can you imagine how amazing it would be to have a real intelligent assistant on your phone?

After playing with Siri for more than a month, I’m still waiting to find out. Instead of an intelligent assistant, I found a lie, and worse, a broken promise.

Here’s the thing: Apple has to bring it to justify those premium prices. And it typically does, even when it is late to the game. The iPod wasn’t the first music player, but it was the best; it was simple and wonderful. The iPhone was not the first smartphone, but it changed people’s lives in a way that hadn’t happened before, it was intuitive and powerful The iPad was not the first of its kind, but I waited for the Cupertino Nod to buy a tablet. You know what? It was worth the wait too.

And then there’s Siri. If I wanted a half-baked voice control system, I could snag a cheap Android phone outright. Instead I waited and gladly plunked down hundreds of dollars on a new iPhone in October — because it promised to be flawless (or close enough), like everything before it.

Check out any of Apple’s ads for the iPhone 4S. They’re promoting Siri so hard you’d be forgiven for thinking Siri is the new CEO of Apple. And it’s not just that first wave of TV ads; a recent email Apple sent out urges you to “Give the phone that everyone’s talking about. And talking to.” It promises “Siri: The intelligent assistant you can ask to make calls, send texts, set reminders and more.”

What those Apple ads fail to report — at all — is that Siri is very much a half-baked product. Siri is officially in beta. Go to Siri’s homepage on Apple.com, and you’ll even notice a little beta tag by the name.

I’m sorry. Beta? Beta is for Google. When Apple does a public beta, it usually keeps it out of the hands of the, you know, public. It typically makes you go get betas. It doesn’t force them on you, much less advertise them. Not that it is an effective disclaimer for the vast buying public. For most people who see Apple’s ads and buy iPhones, the word beta means nothing at all.

That speech recognition is the most obvious example of that beta. Siri’s most common reply to me is that it “didn’t quite get that.” Is this due to my accent? Is it because I mumble? I don’t know, but I do know that my Nexus rarely failed to understand me in the ways Siri does.

Worse than its failure to understand my words is its failure to understand my meaning. Siri is often quite dumb. Sure, it will do what you tell it. But it doesn’t interpret or do nuance, even though that is exactly what Apple promises. The recent abortion flap, for example, seems to be due to Siri’s interpretive failures. Granted, I’m not planning on having an abortion anytime soon, but let’s talk about hospitals.

In the Siri commercial, a woman asks Siri for the fastest way to a particular hospital. That only works because she tells it exactly where she wants to go. Siri is pretty good when you tell it exactly and explicitly what you want. But move into real-world examples and Siri breaks down.

If instead of asking Siri the fastest way to Hospital X, you ask for the fastest way to get to an emergency room, it kicks back a list of all the ones in the area, leaving you bleeding on the floor to decide. Siri provides distances, but it doesn’t show travel time (or traffic congestion) in that list. In short, it doesn’t show the fastest way at all. I’m bleeding here! It may not be an outright lie, but it’s disingenuous enough that I felt deceived when I discovered it. I mean, odds are, if you’re asking for the fastest directions to some sort of medical centre, it’s an emergency. Yeah, the ad is literally true, but also completely false.

It’s also the reason Apple doesn’t show Siri’s full reply when people ask it for directions in the commercials: It doesn’t actually navigate! Dumb old GPS programs and devices have been doing this for years. My nearly two-year-old Android phone did this with aplomb when I would bark an address at it. But not Siri. Siri just delivers a list, which I need to take my eyes off the road to advance through. And God forbid I go off-route. While my Nexus would automatically re-route me, with Siri I have to pull over and ask again. That’s stupid.

The ads deceived me in other subtle ways, too. I love John Coltrane. I’ve got many of his songs in my music library, yet when I ask Siri to “play some Coltrane” (just like in the commercial!) it tells me it can’t find any “coal train”. Is that my fault, Siri? Or do you just not do homophones? Are you not intelligent enough to contextualise sound?

There are more basic interpretive issues as well. I can command Siri to “send my wife a text message and tell her I want to meet her for lunch.” Siri understands that when I say “tell her” I’m still talking about my wife (or whoever), but then it promptly forgets, mid-sentence. So instead of a message that says “I want to meet you for lunch”, it fires off a message reading, “I want to meet her for lunch”. Sure, that’s a fine detail. And yet it’s exactly the kind of detail that I expect of Apple, that usually sets Apple products apart.

And there are basic voice commands you’d think something with a modicum of intelligence in your phone’s operating system could do that Siri simply can’t. It won’t tell me how much battery life is left, or turn my Wi-Fi antenna on or off. It won’t tell me how much free space is left on my phone. It won’t switch my phone to silent or aeroplane mode. It won’t launch the App Store. Or the iTunes Store.

In fact, it basically ignores apps altogether. It can’t launch installed third-party apps, or kill ones that are running. Despite Twitter’s deep integration in iOS 5, it won’t send a tweet for you. If I have my camera app open, it can’t take a picture or set a timer (“I’m not much of a photographer,” it replies), which is precisely the kind of thing voice control could be very useful for. It won’t show specific photos, either. I can define who my wife is in iPhoto, and sync that with my phone. Yet ask Siri to show me a picture of her, and it cluelessly offers to search the web for “picture of my wife”. Dude! Totally not what I was looking for.

There are also things it just fails at. For example, from the cafe where I’m writing this, there are no fewer than three open Wi-Fi hotspots in range. But when I ask “are there open Wi-Fi networks nearby”, it replies that there are not. Again, kind of dumb.

But the worst aspect, and something that Apple downplays in its promotional materials, is that Siri requires a network connection to work. Lose your connection and you lose your assistant. At one point last month, that network dependency meant Siri went down for almost everyone, at the same time. Advertising materials relegate this to small print that isn’t even clearly about Siri.

And for me, once the novelty wore off, what I found was that Siri is not so intelligent after all — it’s simply another voice program that will obey very specific commands. If it knows those commands. If it can understand you. And if it has a network connection. Were this Google, or Microsoft, I’d shrug. But it’s not, it’s Apple. And Apple is the company that sells perfection. It’s a company that usually keeps its promises, and in its Siri ads, it promises far more than what it actually delivers. That’s not what any of us signed up for.

Credits: MAT HONAN

The post Rant: Siri Is Apple’s Broken Promise appeared first on Siri Wiki.

Curious about the iPhone 4S’s new voice assistant feature? So were we.

TUAW tracked down a set of example phrases that the new Siri voice assistant is capable of understanding. It turns out that Siri can handle many categories of voice interaction.

Without further ado, here they are, ordered by interaction category, along with Apple-supplied examples of using each category

Address Book

Querying Contacts

• What’s Michael’s address?
• What is Susan Park’s phone number?
• When is my wife’s birthday?
• Show Jennifer’s home email address

Finding Contacts

• Show Jason Russell
• Find people named Park
• Who is Michael Manning?

Relationships

• My mom is Susan Park
• Michael Manning is my brother
• Call my brother at work

Calendars

Adding Events

• Set up a meeting at 9
• Set up a meeting with Michael at 9
• Meet with Lisa at noon
• Set up a meeting about hiring tomorrow at 9am
• New appointment with Susan Park Friday at 3
• Schedule a planning meeting at 8:30 today in the boardroom

Changing events

• Move my 3pm meeting to 4:30
• Reschedule my appointment with Dr. Manning to next Monday at 9am
• Add Lisa to my meeting with Jason
• Cancel the budget review meeting

Asking about events

• What does the rest of my day look like?
• What’s on my calendar for Friday?
• When is my next appointment?
• When am I meeting with Michael?
• Where is my next meeting?

Alarms

Setting Alarms

• Wake me up tomorrow at 7am
• Set an alarm for 6:30am
• Wake me up in 8 hours
• Change my 6:30 alarm to 6:45
• Turn off my 6:30 alarm
• Delete my 7:30 alarm

Checking the Clock

• What time is it?
• What time is it in Berlin?
• What is today’s date?
• What’s the date this Saturday?

Using a Timer

• Set the timer for ten minutes
• Show the timer
• Pause the timer
• Resume
• Reset the timer
• Stop it

Email

Sending Messages

• Email Lisa about the trip
• Email Jennifer about the change in plans
• New email to Susan Park
• Mail Dad about the rent check
• Email Dr. Manning and say I got the forms, thanks
• Mail Lisa and Jason about the party and say I had a great time

Checking Messages

• Check email
• Any new email from Michael today?
• Show new mail about the lease
• Show the email from Lisa yesterday

Responding to Messages

• Reply Dear Susan sorry about the late payment
• Call him at work

Friends

Checking Up on Friends

• Where’s Jason?
• Where is my sister?
• Is my wife at home?
• Where are all my friends?
• Who is here?
• Who is near me?

Maps

Directions

• How do I get home?
• Show 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino California
• Directions to my dad’s work

Local Businesses

• Find coffee near me
• Where is Starbucks?
• Find some burger joints in Baltimore
• Find a gas station within walking distance
• Good Mexican restaurants around here

Messages

Sending Texts

• Tell Susan I’ll be right there
• Send a message to Jason Russell
• Send a message to Lisa saying how about tomorrow
• Tell Jennifer the show was great
• Send a message to Susan on her mobile saying I’ll be late
• Send a message to 408 555 1212
• Text Jason and Lisa where are you?

Reading Texts

• Read my new messages
• Read it again

Replying to Texts

• Reply that’s great news
• Tell him I’ll be there in 10 minutes
• Call her

Music

Playback

• Play The Light of the Sun
• Play Trouble
• Play Taking Back Sunday shuffled
• Play Alicia Keys
• Play some blues
• Play my party mix
• Shuffle my roadtrip playlist
• Play
• Pause
• Skip

Notes

Creating and finding notes

• Note that I spent $12 on lunch
• Note: check out that new Alicia Keys album
• Find my restaurant note
• Create a reading list note
• Add Tom Sawyer to my reading list note

Phone

Phone calls

• Call Jason
• Call Jennifer Wright mobile
• Call Susan on her work phone
• Call 408 555 1212
• Call home
• FaceTime Lisa

Reminders

Requesting reminders

• Remind me to call mom
• Remind me to call my mom when I get home
• Remember to take an umbrella
• Remind me take my medicine at 6am tomorrow
• Remind me to pick up flowers when I leave here
• Remind me when I leave to call Jason
• Remind me to finish the report by 6

Stocks

Checking Stocks

• What’s Apple’s stock price?
• What is Apple’s PE ratio?
• What did Yahoo close at today?
• How is the Nikkei doing?
• How are the markets doing?
• What is the Dow at?

Weather

Checking the Forecast

• What’s the weather for today?
• What’s the weather for tomorrow?
• Will it rain in Cupertino this week?
• Check next week’s forecast for Burlington
• What’s the forecast for this evening?
• How’s the weather in Tampa right now?
• How hot will it be in Palm Springs this weekend?
• What’s the high for Anchorage on Thursday?
• What’s the temperature outside?
• How windy is it out there?
• When is sunrise in Paris?

Websearch

Looking up information

• Search the web for Bora Bora
• Search for vegetarian pasta recipes
• Search the web for best cable plans
• Google the war of 1812
• Search Wikipedia for Abraham Lincoln
• Search for news about the World Cup
• Bing Alicia Keys

Using Wolfram Alpha

• How many calories in a bagel?
• What is an 18% tip on $86.74 for four people?
• Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?
• How long do dogs live?
• What is the Gossamer Condor?
• What’s the square root of 128?
• How many dollars is €45?
• What was the Best Picture of 1983?
• How many days until Christmas?
• How far away is the Sun?
• When is the next solar eclipse?
• Show me the Orion constellation
• What’s the population of Jamaica?
• How high is Mt. Everest?
• How deep is the Atlantic ocean?
• What’s the price of gasoline in Chicago?

Credits go to : Erica Sadun at http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to-siri/

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