Skip to main content

Conversations with Siri

Siri at your service?
I've finally made the jump to using a tablet.  An iPad, to be exact.  It took me awhile to appreciate the benefits of this form factor, particularly in relation to its price, but now I understand the value (to some degree - it's less valuable when one publishes quite a bit, particularly for work and particularly for doing a lot of typing and creating Microsoft Office documents, but I digress...).

My wife also got an iPad, more precisely a mini.  This suits her well, considering she likes smaller things (witness our dog).  My wife has taken longer than myself to embrace a tablet, due to the issue of publishing quite a bit, particularly for work and particularly for doing a lot of typing and creating Microsoft Office documents (but I digress...).  But little by little, she has started to adopt it as well.

The other night, we were sitting on the couch, and my wife made one of the latest steps towards tablet adoption, by holding down the home button and calling up Siri, the virtual assistant lurking within the latest version of iOS, the iPad operating system.  My wife thought it might help her send an email, which led to the following exchange:

  • My wife: what does this do (holding down the home button)?
  • Me: It answers your questions, if you want to find something
  • Siri: beep beep (prompting "What can I help I help you with?")
  • My wife: ok
  • My wife: Email Todd
  • Siri: I'm sorry, I did not get that.
  • My wife: Email Todd
  • Siri: I'm sorry, I did not get that.
  • My wife: You're worthless.
  • Siri: I understand.
  • My wife: I'm sorry. I feel bad.
  • Siri: It's all good
After the exchange, my wife decided to just tell me what she was going to write instead. Not quite the fully-functioning virtual assistant that was advertised, but random and entertaining (not to mention understanding and polite).  One day, conversations with Siri will be more productive (although perhaps still random and entertaining).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...