On Siri
The more I see about Apple’s Siri technology, the more I think to myself “I want that!“. It is so cool! But several thoughts keep running around in my head:
1) When I tried Dragon Dictation on my iPhone, it was terrible. This is supposed to be use one of the best technologies for voice recognition available, and I think that Siri uses the same engine underneath (correct me if I’m wrong). I tried dictating several sentences to this thing, and it got more than half the words wrong. Maybe my very very slight German accent is throwing it off …
2) Many of Siri’s features look quite useful to me. Many others, especially the oft-demod ones to do with interacting with other people and calendars, are for social butterflies. Which I definitely am not.
3) Now this one I’ll just have to see how well it works in practice. But the demo said that I need to hold the Home button down for several seconds to activate Siri. That’s a bummer. Can’t the iPhone just always be listening if there’s no active app and it’s not in sleep mode? Siri would know I’m talking to it because I would say “Siri, tell me why I’m not a billionaire yet.” (And then of course Siri would metaphorically roll her eyes and tell me what a dufus I am.)
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