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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 5712700" data-attributes="member: 1">I think one needs to think longer term.  At present, Siri is a beta function on a single mobile phone handset.  I've no doubt that the long game involves Siri being on other things - your computer, ostensibly - and able to control a lot of stuff in the house.  Throw your emails up on your TV, record a TV program, change the temperature, that sort of thing.  Those applications of it don't need to worry about the battery power, although they're obviously some way off yet.I can imagine walking into my house and saying "Siri, set the heating at 17 degrees and show me what movies are showing at the local cinema; ah, play me the trailer for A Space Odyssey; OK, buy me two tickets for the 8pm showing and mark that in my calendar."That sort of stuff is so close to real now, especially with Siri; it's more an infrastructure and partnership thing than a tech breakthough thing.  I think Apple wants to run your household for you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I'm finding I'm using Siri a lot at the moment.  It's awesome being able to say to Siri "Invite Al, Neil, Dave, and my wife to Comic Con in London on Saturday the 29th" and have it seamlessly mark the event on my calendar, send a calendar invite to all four recipients (in Sharon's case, because she has an iPhone, it was added to her calendar automatically when she accepted the invitation; in the other three, who don't have iPhones, it sent them emails and they indicated they would be attending; all this info was reflected automatically in my own calendar entry - basic calendar stuff, of course, which everyone can do manually, but it did it all perfectly off that one spoken instruction).Plus going to bed and simply saying "Wake me up at 8am" was awesome.  As was "Remind me to buy dog food when I leave home" and the phone's GPS knows when I leave that geofenced area is creates and reminds me.  I ask it "When is my wife's birthday?" and it verbally answers "Sharon Morrissey's birthday is on December 11th"; I tell it "Remind me on December 5th to buy my wife's birthday presents" and I know it will do exactly that.  I want to cancel my D&D game?  I simply tell it to email or text everyone and it does.  And its answers from Wolfram Alpha are great.  "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?"; "What is the population of Italy?"; "How many British Pounds is 250 US dollars?"; "Multiply 234 by 12 and add 30"; "How old is Bill Gates?" - for single answer data points, it's very, very good and spits the answer right back at you.It doesn't do a LOT yet, but what it does do it does well; and its clearly going to be able to do a lot more over the coming months.  It's annoying that location services don't work outside the US yet, though.  I can easily bypass that problem, though, by instead saying "Search Google for Italian restaurants near me" and it does that just fine (it knows where I am).You can tell I'm a Siri fanboy!Apple's challenge isn't technological now; it's persuading people to do it.  Folks have historically been reluctant to talk to devices for a variety of reaons (self-consciousness; inaccuracy of voice recognition; etc.) and the way around this is through marketing, not tech.  Apple's gotta get you to feel OK about telling a device to do stuff.  It does that the way it does a lot of its devices - market the hell out of them, make sure they do a few things REALLY well rather than a kitchen-sink approach, and then gradually increase the scope until in a few years you realise that without noticing it you're using it for more and more stuff.  That's how they handled the original iPhone - it didn't do a bunch of stuf that other phones did, but the things it did do it did really slickly, really well - and now compare that the latest iPhones can do compared to that original one.</blockquote>

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