Did You Know SIRI Could Roll Dice?

Maybe this isn't news, and I'm the last person to notice this, but after seeing James Wyatt mention that Siri can roll dice, I gave it a try. You can ask Siri to roll a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, or d20 by voice, natively in iOS with no dice-rolling app required. Siri even reads the result to you. Sadly, I couldn't get Siri to understand "3d6" or "3d10" or any other multiple. Anyhow, this is news to me; I don't know if it's common knowledge to the rest of the world!

 

[Morrus]

If I say 'dice' it just rolls 2d6 no matter what else I say. So, just for playing classic traveller then

Try "Roll a d10".

 

[shamsael]

I've been using this feature for a few weeks.

 

[Tormyr]

Note: if you use Siri as a player in your game, she is notoriously bloodthirsty and will try to kill NPC's before even talking to them!

Siri: How much experience for the peasant?

 

[pogre]

Great tip - thanks.

 

[amerigoV]

I asked Siri to roll a d20 this morning and she rolled a 4.

I then asked her to "roll high on a d20"
And her response was "who, me?"

Stupid Siri.

Then I drove into a pond following her directions.

Stupid Siri.

 

[jhilahd]

Google does it to.
"Ok Google, roll dice" and only a d6.

 

[Benji]

Just sitting with the wife trying it out. It rolls d3 & d100 too...

But when we asked it for a d1000, it showed us a list of bakeries, so it's probably doesn't go that high.

 

[Janx]

Nifty! Maybe that feature will actually get me to use Siri.

(I'm about 18 months into owning a 4s.)

Want to own a 5? I haven't sold my 32GB iPhone 5 yet...

I'm not surprised that Siri and Cortana support dice rolling. In theory, both are made by nerds. Just like all search engines excel at finding stuff for nerd queries like "SQL upgrade 2005 to 2014" because Nerds perfected the searches they needed before they turned to the rest of the internet's need to search for Brittany Spears (or who ever is female and popular today).

During my fun time interviewing at MS, I learned that Bing uses multiple search engines utilizing different techniques and catalogs based on the topic. So there's a team working on code for "popular female celebrities" because the way humans search for that, and the type of content they expect to get is different than "js detect if variable is defined" that a programmer would type.

So it's quite likely that the Siri/Coratana teams spent a little time on dice rolls.