Reflections on Siri on “her” 2 Year Birthday

Read this great article in The Verge today on the voice behind Siri. I’m finding myself using #Siri more and more these days, especially for quick tasks that would otherwise take multiple steps and involve unlocking the phone. For example, checking the weather (or checking the weather in another city), setting alarms, changing settings (“set do not disturb”) or location-based alerts (“remind me to check the gas meter when I get home”) which are pretty magical. I’ve even used Siri for dictating texts, but only short messages. IOS 7 Siri is definitely better (though still not perfect) at understanding you even with background noise present. All in all, it’s pretty impressive. She still can’t do “Tea, Earl Gray, Hot” though.

Update: Some further thoughts: Although Siri is great, does it represent another form of walled garden? I will note that I can ask Siri to make a restaurant reservation for me (though not in the UK) but it will only do so through OpenTable. I can get Weather info but I can’t configure it to get weather info from BBC. The lack of an open API for Siri is a bit troublesome. Shouldn’t I be able to plug in to Siri as an app (or a Web App for that matter) and as a data source in a more straightforward way?

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