(
This is the last in the series of three articles about Apple's Siri. We covered her history in March and
laughed with her in April.)These days I often hear my husband's voice coming from his office when he's not on the phone. No, thank goodness, he isn't getting senile.
He's talking to his Siri, who sounds and behaves exactly like my Siri.
We both find
Siri amazingly helpful with routine tasks like setting timers and adding reminders. She's also good at texting and writing simple emails.
For longer emails, it's better to use the microphone in the lower left corner because Siri gets impatient and wants to send incomplete compositions. She can do calculations, too, which is terrific because I'm not good at them.
All the SameIt's impossible not to personify
Siri. But I have
issues with her lack of differentiation. Imagine if you wanted a dog and there was only one color, size and breed available. Consider ringtones. People actually pay to get distinctive ones. And for good reason.
How many times have you reached for your phone when you heard your ringtone coming from someone else's pocket?In spite of the fact that our
Siri's are identical, in less than six months,
we've each gotten quite attached to our iPhones. Will keeps his close to his heart in
a custom-designed pouch that we had crafted by a local leather smith. His phone is useless without reading glasses, so there is a slot for each. I scoured the Internet for such a carrier, but found none.
Not needing reading glasses,
I carry mine, like a Western gunslinger, in my right pocket. I won't buy any new clothes that lack pockets. And I shun garments in my wardrobe that don't have a place for my phone.
On TargetAs mentioned in the first article,
Siri's inventors sought to create:
". . . a human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious tasks." For sure, there's more to come, but as a first pass,
we both give our current Siri a thumbs up.
I can just imagine
Steve Jobs sitting on a fluffy white cloud in heaven looking down with pleasure at how
Siri has wormed her way into the hearts and minds of so many earthlings. I just hope we aren't all
lemmings jumping off a cliff.