At this year’s WWDC event, Apple announced the additional features it was bringing to Siri as part of its iOS version 6 upgrade. On the flip side, Siri has been sometimes dismissed as a gimmick, and has been the subject of lawsuits that accuse Apple of overselling the capabilities of a feature that is still officially beta.Īt its introduction, Siri was able to interact with the iPhone’s native apps as well as external apps such as the “answer engine” Wolfram Alpha for executing web searches.

Siri has been anthromorphised, by Apple as well as others, as a female and is repeatedly referred to as “she”. It’s also seemingly able to engage in witty repartee to answer questions about the meaning of life (“ 42”), suggest places to hide a body and report its owner to the Intelligent Agents’ Union for harassment. Siri is able to carry a conversation with its users and provide the semblance of a human personality. Naturally, data usage is higher on a Siri-enabled iPhone. Therefore, Siri requires an active wireless internet connection over which it transmits data to Apple’s servers where most of the processing is performed. Speech recognition and reasoning require matching voice patterns against databases and running extensive statistical analysis – tasks that require computing power and memory in excess of that provided by the processor in iPhone 4S. If things go wrong - for example, there is no contact called “Mum” - the assistant should be able to inform its human with a simple response and try to get more data to fulfil the request. A simple command such as “Give Mum a ring” requires the assistant to understand that the action required is to make a phone call to a contact called “Mum” and not to present an actual ring.ĭelegation requires firing a specific handler – in this case, the app that actually makes the phone call – with the task of executing the action. Reasoning not only requires recognising the intent of the words but also the context in which they were spoken. Rosie, of The Jetsons’ fame – Siri’s grandma? Pocheco

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