I can’t believe I’m actually thinking of upgrading my iPhone (rather than switching to a different OS), but Siri has me interested. I’ve had bad experiences with voice recognition in the past, though. What are you experiences with Siri so far?
Thanks!
One of my bosses had some fun one day asking it different questions (and you can find the same junk in the tech mags) but otherwise I haven’t heard anything really positive or negative about it.
I got my first iPhone about 4 hours ago. I held down the Home button until Siri popped up, and touched the microphone icon, and said “Remind me to charge my phone in an hour”, and damned if it didn’t beep and show a text box saying “Charge your phone” an hour later.
Yeah, this is so startling, I forget what else I ought to say. Then I said, “Where is the nearest gas station” (I know this is one of their examples but it’s still pretty surprising to me). It brought up a list of 8 gas stations sorted by distance. I touched one of the list items and it asked if I wanted help navigating to it. I said “Yes”, and it showed a map with me and the gas station on it.
I’m sure it isn’t human, but it is obviously close enough to be genuinely useful for some things.
I’m interested in what you think when you’ve had it a little longer. Whether it’s more of a ‘cool gimmick’ or actually a great, new feature…
Well as someone who hates typing on those damn things, telling it to instant message my son (stated his name) “Where are you?” when he was out past curfew, and having it confirm what I wanted sent to whom and then being able to just send, was nice.
OTOH I have a friend whose name ends in -off and when the damn thing came on when I didn’t want it to and I told it to turn off, it just automatically called my buddy. Annoying.
I had the Siri app on my 3GS and 4 and loved it. It’s been pulled off my phone now, since the 4S came out. Boo.
I’ve had the iPhone 4S for over a week now, and I really like Siri. Some of it is gimmicky; I can’t think of any reason to ask it what the meaning of life is aside from a minute’s amusement. But it’s very useful for stuff I need to ask or remember because I can talk faster than I can type. If I had to type “Get shrimp at Giant”, it would take me a few minutes but if I set the reminder through Siri, it’ll take me a second or two.
It’s cool.
It doesn’t always work, but it works better than I expected current voice-recognition to work. It can’t really pick you out of surrounding noise, so you need to be in a reasonably non-noisy environment.
This afternoon I was putting on my bike shoes to meet a friend for a ride. Hit the button on my phone and said “text Nick that I’m leaving right now.” It knew which Nick (the first time I said “Nick” to it, it asked me which Nick in my address book. Now it just knows.
I can tell it “Remind me to do X when I get home/to work”, and the reminder goes off when I’m 50 feet or so away.
I set alarms and timers by just telling the phone to set them. It’s faster than finding the app and fiddling with things.
If I had already had an iPhone 4, I don’t think it would be worth the upgrade, but the better camera + faster proc + Siri made it worth the extra $100 for me.
Don’t have it myself, but have spent time playing with it for work reasons and it worked pretty well.
That said, I have to start listening to other people on the train composing emails, tweets, and Facebook updates I suspect there will be an unexplained uptick in passenger-on-passenger violence.
It’s also nice because it doesn’t need to be trained like Dragon does; it will work with just about any voice. This is helpful if Airman wants to set a reminder for me to do something.
Does it work if you are scottish?
According to an article in this week’s Sunday Times, it will work with any UK accent except Welsh. No, I can’t think why Welsh should be harder than Scottish. And I don’t think they can have tested any really strong accents.
We were playing around with a friend’s phone while drinking at a bar. I said, “I’m drunk”, and Siri replied with two local taxi services!
I have an Android, so I installed Iris. The voice recognition is fantastic. Iris is more of a toy(supposedly they made Iris in eight hours), but the future looks bright.
Why not?
Unfortunately, I only upgraded to the iPhone 4 6 months ago, so I have to wait (although I may just shell out the $600). But everyone else in my department has upgraded and love Siri!
Siri users beware!..
I don’t think this is that big a deal.
My worry with someone stealing my phone is that they’ll be able to read my email and, say, change the password on my bank accounts. Sending texts or emails to people already in my address book isn’t a sufficiently large security risk for me to make Siri require an unlock. It’s way less useful if I have to unlock it before setting a quick reminder or sending a quick text.
Iris is in alpha, and, to me, it seems it. Voice Actions, on the other hand, really works. It has a sense of humour. Ask it what a genie is. 
:D:D
I had my doubts at first - it had a hard time recognizing my friend’s name - but now I’m a fan. Most of it is pretty useless to me, since it’s faster and better to do searches and such manually, but the reminder function is fantastic. It’s sufficiently easier and faster than manually setting up reminders that I actually use it a lot, whereas before I would put important things on my calendar, but not little stuff.
Also, I’m not using a lot of the functions, but I think that’s mostly because I don’t drive; I always have my hands free, no biggie. But I could see searching for a gas station without typing being really awesome if you’re on a road trip.