Is Siri perfect? you will be the judge

By now, everyone has heard the deafening buzz surrounding Siri, Apple’s headline-grabbing virtual assistant and the key selling point of the new iPhone 4S. Most people have probably seen the TV commercials in which people of all consumer demographics turn to Siri with a seemingly limitless list of tasks, from texting loved ones to setting a reminder to buy milk. and figure out how to tie a bow tie. But what everyone probably wants to know, even those who may have spent a little time with Siri, is just how useful the seemingly too-good-to-be-true digital companion actually is. We’ve pestered Siri with countless requests since it arrived with our iPhone 4S on launch day, and we’ve thought a lot about the role it can play in the daily digital lives of people today and tomorrow. Our find? Siri is not perfect. She makes some dumb mistakes. And in the grand scheme of things, its uses are pretty limited. But when you ask him to remind you to do something, he really does remember. When you tell her to text, she does. And when you ask “Who’s the boss?” she gets information on Bruce Springsteen. The amazing thing about Siri is that, as insanely cool as she looks on TV, she’s every bit as good as advertised.

When Siri was first announced, our biggest concern was that voice recognition never seemed ready for prime time. Even the best dictation apps have been inaccurately especially helpful, and don’t get us started on Apple’s frustratingly ineffective voice control. How well would Siri work, we wonder, if it couldn’t understand our questions and send gibberish-filled text messages? Fortunately, this has proven to be another area where Apple has succeeded after so many others have failed. Siri won’t understand everything you say, and you have to speak a bit stiffly for best results, but her dictation is very accurate. Dictating emails and text messages is so fast that the time you spend cleaning them up is negligible. You can even tell Siri to add punctuation as you speak, using commands like “period,” “quote/end quote,” “uppercase,” and “new line.” And Siri will take dictation in any app that incorporates the standard iOS 5 keyboard, with a quick tap of a new microphone key.

As with dictation, we’ve found that several of Siri’s biggest benefits come from its most basic features. Playing music in the car, for example, is much easier (and safer) with Siri playing the role of her personal DJ, especially if her car is full of kids constantly shouting random requests from the backseat. Simply telling Siri to “play ‘Mickey Mouse Clubhouse'” or “play some pop songs” makes the music play quickly, even from your phone’s lock screen, and it does so without having to take your eyes off the road to search. groping through long lists of artists, albums, and playlists. It’s also more convenient to say “Call my wife” than to launch the phone app and scroll through her contacts to find her. Siri is also the ultimate calculator, capable of converting measurements, determining proper tip amounts, and performing complex mathematical formulas without knowing how they work. It’s little things like these that have already firmly embedded Siri in our daily lives.

What’s really exciting about Siri is its seemingly limitless potential for future growth. Because all of Siri’s thinking and fact-checking happens on remote servers and not on your phone, Apple can improve Siri’s performance and evolve its functionality as quickly and as often as you choose, possibly without the need for a constant firmware. Updates We would be surprised if many of the rough edges found in the current beta version of the software are not smoothed out in the coming months, followed by some obvious improvements to its existing functionality. Siri can read incoming text, for example, but currently it can’t read old texts, emails, books, web pages, or anything else. It can list nearby theaters, but it can’t tell you what’s playing in them. It can help you create a note, but it can’t delete it.

Those deficiencies should be easy to address; It will be much more interesting to see Siri integrate with more apps and data sources beyond Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. An ESPN or Yahoo Sports partnership, for example, might allow us to ask Siri “Who’s winning the Lakers game?” And with the support of Fandango, we could ask Siri to “order two tickets for the Immortals.” And don’t expect such useful features to remain restricted to the iPhone. Siri support for the next iPad is pretty much guaranteed (in fact, we wonder why it’s not already available for the iPad 2), and if the latest internet rumors are to be believed, it won’t be long before we can ask the virtual assistant to find our favorite shows on an Apple HDTV with Siri. And from there… the user interface and the form factor could undergo radical changes. An iPhone, for example, is the size and shape it is in part because your thumb needs to be able to reach every corner of the screen and because the keys on an on-screen keyboard need a certain amount of space to function. But the more we can interact with our phones without touching or typing, the less constrained the hardware will be by the factors that have shaped the way our devices look so far.

After spending so much time with Siri, we’re convinced the feature isn’t an instant gimmick: It shares the key qualities that define all Apple revolutionaries: It makes frequent daily functions faster, easier, and more enjoyable to perform. . It has that Apple magic that draws people in and delights them, but more importantly, it’s significantly useful. We’re more than willing to put up with the occasional prying glance from a stranger to avoid laboriously typing out a text message with the cluttered on-screen keyboard.

And yet, the Siri we have today is just a starting point, raw and far from finished. Years from now, this initial release will no doubt seem far inferior to the improvements we’ve grown accustomed to. But we’ll also look back in some wonder and say, “That’s where it all started.”