If you’re reading this review of Siri then you probably know what Siri is. If you don’t, Siri is Apple’s new Personal Assistant that is available only on the iPhone 4S.
Siri is a voice to text system that allows you to naturally ask Siri a question and most of the time Siri responds with a good or suitable answer. If Siri can’t help then it will suggest that you perform a web search.
What you first have to understand with Siri is that it has a limited vocabulary of around 5,000 words. Although this is a lot in terms of a voice to text system, it’s not a lot when you think that the Oxford English Dictionary contains words for over 170,000.
Siri doesn’t respond well to multiple questions.
If you provide Siri with limited information, it then asks you a second question, and you answer the second question, it seems to treat it as a new question. e.g. ask Siri where 1 Infinite Loop is in California.
Mixing words and numbers doesn’t go down well with Siri
Ask Siri something like what is the full price of the iPhone 4S in the UK and it seems to get a little confused with what you actually said.
Likewise if you ask it where 4 Bloomsbury Square in London is, it doesn’t understand the number 4
Ask Siri where you are and how to get home
If you tell Siri you’re lost, it says it can’t provide any maps or directions in the UK. It can provide them in the US though.
Apple repeatedly lose their iPhone’s in bars, so I thought I’d ask Siri what to do in the event of finding a lost or stolen iPhone.
So it seems Apple things if you find a lost iPhone you want to have a number of meetings about it.
Christmas
I decided to try Siri out to see what Siri knows about Christmas
Father’s day and Mother’s day
I quizzed Siri a week ago over when was Father’s day and Mother’s day. Although Siri came back with results, it came back with the US holidays and not UK holidays, even when using the UK voice.
Testing 1 week later Siri now doesn’t come back with any results on this question…
Siri can’t handle generic questions, it’s vocabulary isn’t wide enough
Siri simply cannot handle a generic question, although it will allow you to search the web.
First man on the moon?
Siri, who was the first man on the moon? Hmmmm, I don’t think so…
What Siri is good for?
Siri is spectacular at giving you people’s birthday’s. It can even create relationships, so if you ask it “When is mum’s birthday” it will lookup your mothers name and provide the birthday. That’s of course providing you have entered all the details in the contact record.
Siri is also good for finding out what appointments you have scheduled
Siri is also good at getting weather reports from Yahoo. Although sometimes Siri can get a little flustered, as though s/he has just been awoken from a deep sleep.
Likewise sometimes she can get the text completely wrong. I put this down to some beta bugs that need to be ironed out of the system at the server end.
Siri has been programmed to sometimes be vague or provide different answers to the same questions, e.g. in “What’s the meaning of life”.
Siri is great at playing music
Siri is great about finding out about products but isn’t quite as good at retrieving the latest news.
Sometimes Siri can get a bit pedantic and stuck in his/her way
What Siri will really get confused with is different meanings for a similar word. e.g. Soul (as in Soul Mate), Sole (as in fish)
So there you have it, Siri is still in beta so s/he will get some things wrong. If you really want to get the most out of Siri then try to use it on weather forecasts and anything to do with calendars or contacts on your iPhone. You can eve use Siri to create a reminder, although it will create it as a Task and not a reminder. I’m sure Apple can start to iron out some of these bugs and improve Siri. Although the UK voice for Siri was recorded about 5 years ago, and I suspect similarly other language voices may not be that new either.
Will Siri’s UK male voice be changed or will they have the same voice-over artist record additional strings? Ultimately it would be good to be able to choose a female voice for the UK. You can choose the US voice but then the amount of words it understands based on accent tend to drop percentage wise. I think Siri is a pretty good product as it stands already, it’s certainly better than the Android equivalent and hopefully will improve over time.
Apple have released iOS 5 and it’s now available to download to your iOS devices.
This week saw the passing of Steve Jobs due to a long outstanding illness of pancreatic cancer and I thought it might be time to look back and see how far has mobile technology come in the last 10 years?
Apple have announced that the 16gb iPhone 4S price will start from £499, although Apple haven’t yet announced the 32gb or the new 64gb prices.
When I’m out with friends, many have their phones or gadgets die just when they want to use them, and mine are always fully charged. I always get asked how come I have so good battery power on my gadgets? It’s quite simple, I have a host of battery chargers I use.
So in essence if I take all 4x battery chargers out I can get a massive 8x full charges of an iPhone. For the most part I never usually have to charge up my iPad as I’m never away for more than 10 hours from an electrical plug socket, but it’s nice to know I have some power on tap if I need it.
This is a common question I receive a lot from people that ask me by email or in person. I converted from PC to Mac a little late, about 9 months ago to be exact. I decided at a whim to suddenly try the other side as grass is usually always greener on the other side of the fence you sit on, even though many friends had tried to convert me to the Mac OS for a number of years. I think the first suggestion was around 2001 and 10 years later I finally made the jump (or is it a leap?).
What should you look at when buying a Mac? Don’t go for the entry level model. When you look at prices you’ll say “£1000+ for a laptop? I can get a PC Laptop for £399!”. Yes you can, but it’s an entry level laptop. It might be a 15″ or 17″ laptop but it’s running a slower processor, less RAM and the build quality is probably pretty plastic. MacBook Air’s and MacBook Pro’s are much more robust, build quality is superb in a single aluminium unibody (single block of metal hollowed out). Take a look at a windows based laptop for around £1000-£1300 and then compare those specs to the Mac’s. If you’re not looking to pay £1000 then quite simply you’re not looking at a high-end laptop, so the Mac’s may not be for you (likewise the better higher-end Windows laptops aren’t for you either). If you’re okay with paying this amount of money for a laptop then you’re going to get a good laptop. Get the best processor and RAM you can afford, ensure you get a laptop with an SSD (Solid State Drive) and one that’s the largest your an afford (yes you will need it).
The Mac’s with Snow Leopard have the AppStore as a download, Lion now has the Mac AppStore integrated fully into the Operating System. The Mac AppStore is similar to what you would see on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, which offers a lot of inexpensive applications (and games), and is a good first check to kitting out your Mac’s. Apple do take 30% cut from developers through the AppStore, so you some developers still prefer to do a slightly cheaper version outside of the AppStore and to make a little more revenue per sale. However then you have to know how to install DMG files (which the Mac AppStore is just plug and play), tap on something, purchase it, it downloads and installs automatically without having to do anything else).
I think I have done a pretty good job in my standards of avoiding the Google Street View Car over the past couple of years, but that day had to come where it would make the pounce and I couldn’t avoid it.
More recently on a trip up into the Highlands in Scotland, unfortunately I wasn’t able to escape the evil grasps of the Google Street View car. I was traveling up through GlenCoe and low and behold what appeared coming towards me at lightening speed was the Google Street View Car….DARN! It got me!
SSD’s are the newt way forward, they’re Solid State Drives, e.g. no moving parts. No latency on having to spin the disk up to speed, e.g. 7200 rpm (revs per minute) and then having to have a head (needle) touch the disk (which can sometimes scratch the surface and damage it under movement/shock).
SSD’s aren’t all that rosy though. They’re still new for one thing, there’s still no average as they’re new on how long they’ll last. Most manufacturers of SSD’s claim that they will most likely last less than a regular Hard Disk Drive. Likewise if they start to die, the suggestion is they will die quickly as opposed to a spinning Hard Disk Drive, although I’m not too sure of that. On average I find my hard drives in laptops last around 2 years or less, so if an SSD were to last 18 months, then I would still be happy if I could get the speed gain that I really crave as a power user.
Now both my MacBook Air run an SSD and my 
I added the word ‘good’ to the title of this post because there are dozens of iPhone Alarm Clock docks available.
A year on I had been taking a very extensive look at the current assortment of iPhone Alarm Clock docks and it still seems that nothing has moved forward in a year. 90% of all the iPhone Alarm Clock docks do not say whether they support the iPhone 4, be it on web stores or more importantly on the manufacturer websites. You have to dive deeper into looking at customer comments on each webstore or reviews to work out which ones still don’t support the iPhone 4. In a year my requirements have changed, no longer do I have a 3GS or a single iPhone, I have 2x iPhone 4′s, so I want an iPhone Alarm Clock dock that supports two iPhone 4′s. I also have an iPad, but I’m not expecting any of these iPhone Alarm Clock docks to support the iPad, that would be just too much of a requirement.
Whittling down the iPhone Alarm Clock docks that have a dual charger facility and that support the iPhone 4 I came up with only two. Actually there’s like a dozen, but the majority of these say that the left hand dock only sync’s and doesn’t charge and the right hand dock only charges the iPhone 4. Or that one dock is for iPhone 4 and the other for a non-iPhone. That unfortunately rules them out in my situation.
I’m amazed that with people either married or in relationships, that charging two iPhones in the bedroom is I would have thought it quite a necessity now days, yet there’s very few alarm clock docks that will actually allow you to do it. Why?
I really wish companies would stand up and take note that having one of these in the bedroom is a good thing. I suspect another reason why companies aren’t making these is that they feel that each person has their own bed stand, so will want their iPhone close to them. So that means going for a single iPhone Alarm Clock dock for each person, which also adds to their profits.
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