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I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri. Most people have never used voice recognition beyond shouting "Cal

I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri. Most people have never used voice recognition beyond shouting "Call Dave Jobs[1] Mobile" in the car. This is going to be perceived as magic, in the same way as the accelerometer in the Wii or the original finger touch interface. Anyone with a 4S is going to be showing this off to their friends, and I can't wait to try it. There are parallels with people saying 'Touch has been around for years, but people prefer buttons' when the iPhone came out. True - until someone did it right. And now everyone wants touch. And yes, I know it's been around on Android. But Apple make you WANT to use it. No-one's ever been bursting with excitement to show me their Android voice recognition stuff, and nor have I been wetting myself to try it out. On the downside for Apple - improvements to the iPhone for the foreseeable future look to be on the software/web server side. They are vulnerable here. Limiting features to new models is going to piss people off, and fighting patent battles on software is much, much harder. [1] Funny typo - I meant to type Dave Jones. Only noticed this on rereading the post.

doomlaser 15y ago
Siri has been out since 2010 on the app store. Is there any reason (other than Apple's push with building it into the operating system) that users will take more notice of it now than they have in the last (nearly) two years?
- mcobrien 15y ago
  Building it into the operating system is good enough reason.
- robryan 15y ago
  Simply getting it in front of more users might make the difference. It's also a lot more tightly integrated I would assume.
  - cstuder 15y ago
    A lot, yes. Apparently you can just hold the phone to your ear in order to activate it.
    - michaelbuckbee 15y ago
      From the videos I've seen it looks like it launches via holding down the home key and at least for some command separation you need to hit the "talk" button with the Siri application.
      - masklinn 15y ago
        There are two options to activate Siri: use the Home button, or just put it to your ear, as if you were talking on your phone rather than to. The second option can be disabled, but it's there and enabled by default.
        jmreid 15y ago
        That'll make me use it in public more. Genius move. I'm just too shy to walk down the street and talk to my phone without it looking like I'm talking to someone.
        protomyth 15y ago
        The no button option will rock for my Mom, no button - less problems.
      - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
        Hitting the talk button for command separation is optional. It will just wait for a pause.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  I'll answer with a parallel: "The secret to ending all poverty and hunger has been hidden deep in the earth's crust for two decades. Is there any reason why digging it out and placing it in Times Square for all to examine (except for the fact that now everyone can see it) will cause people to take more notice now than they did before?"
  - gms 15y ago
    I don't get it.
    - danilocampos 15y ago
      The poster has treated as trivial the most crucial shift in the described circumstance. (And thereby answered his/her own question)
    - stonemetal 15y ago
      It was a diamond in the rough, it just got de-roughed and as such is more diamond-y. Or it was a really cool product that people over looked, by featuring it prominently Apple hopes to get a lot of reward for very little effort.
- saturdaysaint 15y ago
  This is vastly more capable and polished than the app in the App Store for the last two years. Deep integration with calendar, reminders, location (it looks like they've smoothed over a lot of the awkward permission requests in iOS 4), phone book and hardware (via the home button) makes it a radically different app.
- mikeash 15y ago
  Integrating it with the OS is the reason users will take more notice now. I'm not sure why you dismiss that, but it's actually a huge deal. I've used Siri on and off since it came out. It's pretty good. The reasons I don't use it more are precisely the problems that will be solved by integrating it into the OS. First, the app was a pain in the ass to activate, requiring half a dozen taps to get started. This problem disappears on the 4S. Second, the app couldn't do anything with the data on the phone (like send e-mails or check my calendar) because it didn't have access, or at least they didn't build it to. Again, this problem disappears with integration. The main advantage of something like Siri is convenience and speed. The app couldn't achieve that precisely because it was an app that wasn't built in to the OS.
  - doomlaser 15y ago
    I'm not disputing that bulding it into the OS is a big deal, but pointing out that in its 2 years of public release on the app store, Siri didn't see the organic growth of apps like Instagram or Hipstamatic. Apple has added new features to integrate it more deeply with things like the Calendar and Reminders apps, but at the same time, half of Scott Forstall's demo commands at the 4S keynote were exactly the same as the Siri demo at 2009's All Things D conference.
    - mikeash 15y ago
      A big part of building it into the OS is that it only takes a single action to activate, instead of the half dozen or so plus a considerable amount of waiting that it takes to activate the standalone app. I believe this will result in a qualitative difference. The app was mostly a novelty that was usually slower and less convenient than doing things directly. The OS service is likely to be considerably faster and more convenient than the other paths that exist for achieving what it can do.
- dextorious 15y ago
  Huh? I, for one, didn't even know Siri existed until the keynote. So I'd say, yes, there is a reason.
jvdh 15y ago
"I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri." I think that that is exactly why we (tech people) hate it so much. We like to be in control of what happens, and Siri is all about giving most of that control over to your iPhone.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  I'd speak for yourself — as a die hard "tech person" nothing in tech gives me a beefier erection than successfully accomplishing science fiction.
  - edoloughlin 15y ago
    Thanks for that mental image.
- funkah 15y ago
  No, it is simply another means of control, like touch input.
- icebraining 15y ago
  We do? I'm an geek, using Linux with a custom kernel and a tilling WM, and I never had any real interest in Apple products, but Siri seems fantastic; it's the first time I really want an iPhone feature. Siri seems to be the dream of every guy who read or viewed sci-fi, where voice interfaces are ubiquitous. Sure, I'd wish it didn't transmit everything to "the cloud", and I'm definitively not buying an iPhone just for it, but it reached to me like no other Apple product did.
- mhw 15y ago
  Not all of us tech people aspire to be system administrator on every single box with an operating system that we own or come into contact with. Eventually you start to realise there are too many boxes and not enough time. I have absolutely zero interest in being able to ssh into my mobile phone - I'm happy to accept that the people who were working on building the mobile phone full-time are going to be doing better work than I can manage to squeeze in outside of my day job.
ZeroGravitas 15y ago
You could replace a few words and that comment would apply to last year's "one more thing": video chat. And many people did make exactly those comments. (Actually most of them said "Apple did it first! Wait, Europe had what a decade ago? Okay, I meant Apple did it best! That's why it'll catch on this time.") As far as I can tell it's still the same niche users using it for the same niche tasks (talking to kids on business trips, sexting etc.). Nice to have for those that need it, but they mostly had it already via netbooks with Skype. Likewise, I'm hearing about how this is going to transform computing for people with certain disabilities, when they've apparently just bought the same Dragon software you've been able to buy for years (for transcription, the Siri stuff is apparently semi-distinct). Don't get me wrong, I like that I can already call up songs in my car by voice with my $100, no-contract, chinese-branded, 600Mhz ARM11 Android phone with a 3rd party, free, ad-supported app. (I amuse myself by practicing my french pronunciation with it too) The gushing just gets a bit old, as does the speculation about what magical powers the A5 must have to enable such wizardry.
- saturdaysaint 15y ago
  I don't think Facetime's first year was a good measure of it's longer term outlook. The inability to use it with any past iOS products severely limited the launch impact - you were limited to whoever was buying the iPhone 4. With the 4S, just about everyone on an iOS device will have Facetime, and iMessage is obviously an effort to further this sense of a BBM-style device "club" among one's peers.
  - jonknee 15y ago
    A lot of people have Macs. Plus Steve said that FaceTime was going to be an open standard, but that never happened. If they thought the network effect was a problem, they sure haven't tried solving it.
- ugh 15y ago
  The two features aren’t really comparable. It makes no sense to compare the two.
Angostura 15y ago
"I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri." Perhaps. But I as a tech person find it magical. But I showed the video of Siri in action to my wife and she had an immediate, visceral hatred of the idea of talking to the phone like that "If I want to set a bloody alarm, I'll tap the set alarm button thank you". For context, she's not a luddite, she's tech savvy, though not into tech or its own sake. But I don't think she'll be alone, I think this is a feature that many non-tech people will loathe initially, perhaps for reasons they cannot articulate.
- brador 15y ago
  I'd suggest this is due to the necessity to "converse" with Siri. I don't want to pretend I'm talking to a human when talking to a phone because if I'm on a train/plane I'd look like an idiot. Instead, if it could understand something along the lines of: "alarm, 5.30, tomorrow" that'd be much better, quicker and simpler than: "Siri, set my alarm for 5.30am tomorrow morning". I don't want to have a conversation with my phone. Get in, get it done, get out. Speed always wins. But then I hate the new dumbed down Google too so what do I know eh. Siri will flop, the speed is a non-issue for the majority of iPhone owners and the camera just about brings the phone up to spec with it's competitor cameras. If they went for a an iPhone 5 and iPad3 they would have made an absolute killing this christmas.
  - davidedicillo 15y ago
    "If they went for a an iPhone 5 and iPad3 they would have made an absolute killing this christmas." Yeah, instead they only pre-sold one million of them in 24h.
    - brador 15y ago
      Well, they may have allegedly pre-sold one million within 24 hours, but they certainly won't get my $1,000+, which still sits by my desk waiting for the iPad3 and iPhone 5. I know two others who won't be upgrading on either product too, so thats another $2,000. Small sample, yes, yet representative of the population I'd say if you exclude end of contract "forced" sales.
zerostar07 15y ago
My android phone has been begging me to talk to her for more than a year, but i refuse. It's still deep in the uncanny valley for me. You mentioned yourself that it might be useful in the car, where you are alone and nobody can hear you. Speech is disemmination, not simple message passing. It's literally shouting, when you really should only be whispering. If it was handwriting-recognition or some magical mind-reading or gesture-reading device i 'd use it.
- dextorious 15y ago
  To recap, you haven't tried Siri. > You mentioned yourself that it might be useful in the car, where you are alone and nobody can hear you. And what if people can hear you, in the street say? It's not like we don't already TALK to our phones all the time while walking in the street. You think it matters to passers-by if you talk to your boss or Siri? > It's literally shouting, when you really should only be whispering. Huh? What do you mean with this bizzaro comparison?
  - zerostar07 15y ago
    It's all a matter of least effort. I can imagine a few situations where it's handy, but most times the gain in effort to setup a reminder for example is offset by the inappropriateness of the situation. It becomes net positive at times when your hands are not available (the promo video shows people running, cooking, driving)
jonknee 15y ago
> "Call Dave Jobs Mobile" This can be done on iPhones through the regular Voice Control feature in iOS 4. I use it frequently to change music while walking (holding the middle button on my headphones activates Voice Control).
- slantyyz 15y ago
  Voice Control sucks for me, especially with ethnic names.

doomlaser 15y ago

Siri has been out since 2010 on the app store. Is there any reason (other than Apple's push with building it into the operating system) that users will take more notice of it now than they have in the last (nearly) two years?

mcobrien 15y ago
Building it into the operating system is good enough reason.
robryan 15y ago
Simply getting it in front of more users might make the difference. It's also a lot more tightly integrated I would assume.
- cstuder 15y ago
  A lot, yes. Apparently you can just hold the phone to your ear in order to activate it.
  - michaelbuckbee 15y ago
    From the videos I've seen it looks like it launches via holding down the home key and at least for some command separation you need to hit the "talk" button with the Siri application.
    - masklinn 15y ago
      There are two options to activate Siri: use the Home button, or just put it to your ear, as if you were talking on your phone rather than to. The second option can be disabled, but it's there and enabled by default.
      - jmreid 15y ago
        That'll make me use it in public more. Genius move. I'm just too shy to walk down the street and talk to my phone without it looking like I'm talking to someone.
        protomyth 15y ago
        The no button option will rock for my Mom, no button - less problems.
    - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
      Hitting the talk button for command separation is optional. It will just wait for a pause.
danilocampos 15y ago
I'll answer with a parallel: "The secret to ending all poverty and hunger has been hidden deep in the earth's crust for two decades. Is there any reason why digging it out and placing it in Times Square for all to examine (except for the fact that now everyone can see it) will cause people to take more notice now than they did before?"
- gms 15y ago
  I don't get it.
  - danilocampos 15y ago
    The poster has treated as trivial the most crucial shift in the described circumstance. (And thereby answered his/her own question)
  - stonemetal 15y ago
    It was a diamond in the rough, it just got de-roughed and as such is more diamond-y. Or it was a really cool product that people over looked, by featuring it prominently Apple hopes to get a lot of reward for very little effort.
saturdaysaint 15y ago
This is vastly more capable and polished than the app in the App Store for the last two years. Deep integration with calendar, reminders, location (it looks like they've smoothed over a lot of the awkward permission requests in iOS 4), phone book and hardware (via the home button) makes it a radically different app.
mikeash 15y ago
Integrating it with the OS is the reason users will take more notice now. I'm not sure why you dismiss that, but it's actually a huge deal. I've used Siri on and off since it came out. It's pretty good. The reasons I don't use it more are precisely the problems that will be solved by integrating it into the OS. First, the app was a pain in the ass to activate, requiring half a dozen taps to get started. This problem disappears on the 4S. Second, the app couldn't do anything with the data on the phone (like send e-mails or check my calendar) because it didn't have access, or at least they didn't build it to. Again, this problem disappears with integration. The main advantage of something like Siri is convenience and speed. The app couldn't achieve that precisely because it was an app that wasn't built in to the OS.
- doomlaser 15y ago
  I'm not disputing that bulding it into the OS is a big deal, but pointing out that in its 2 years of public release on the app store, Siri didn't see the organic growth of apps like Instagram or Hipstamatic. Apple has added new features to integrate it more deeply with things like the Calendar and Reminders apps, but at the same time, half of Scott Forstall's demo commands at the 4S keynote were exactly the same as the Siri demo at 2009's All Things D conference.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    A big part of building it into the OS is that it only takes a single action to activate, instead of the half dozen or so plus a considerable amount of waiting that it takes to activate the standalone app. I believe this will result in a qualitative difference. The app was mostly a novelty that was usually slower and less convenient than doing things directly. The OS service is likely to be considerably faster and more convenient than the other paths that exist for achieving what it can do.
dextorious 15y ago
Huh? I, for one, didn't even know Siri existed until the keynote. So I'd say, yes, there is a reason.

jvdh 15y ago

"I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri." I think that that is exactly why we (tech people) hate it so much. We like to be in control of what happens, and Siri is all about giving most of that control over to your iPhone.

danilocampos 15y ago
I'd speak for yourself — as a die hard "tech person" nothing in tech gives me a beefier erection than successfully accomplishing science fiction.
- edoloughlin 15y ago
  Thanks for that mental image.
funkah 15y ago
No, it is simply another means of control, like touch input.
icebraining 15y ago
We do? I'm an geek, using Linux with a custom kernel and a tilling WM, and I never had any real interest in Apple products, but Siri seems fantastic; it's the first time I really want an iPhone feature. Siri seems to be the dream of every guy who read or viewed sci-fi, where voice interfaces are ubiquitous. Sure, I'd wish it didn't transmit everything to "the cloud", and I'm definitively not buying an iPhone just for it, but it reached to me like no other Apple product did.
mhw 15y ago
Not all of us tech people aspire to be system administrator on every single box with an operating system that we own or come into contact with. Eventually you start to realise there are too many boxes and not enough time. I have absolutely zero interest in being able to ssh into my mobile phone - I'm happy to accept that the people who were working on building the mobile phone full-time are going to be doing better work than I can manage to squeeze in outside of my day job.

ZeroGravitas 15y ago

You could replace a few words and that comment would apply to last year's "one more thing": video chat. And many people did make exactly those comments. (Actually most of them said "Apple did it first! Wait, Europe had what a decade ago? Okay, I meant Apple did it best! That's why it'll catch on this time.") As far as I can tell it's still the same niche users using it for the same niche tasks (talking to kids on business trips, sexting etc.). Nice to have for those that need it, but they mostly had it already via netbooks with Skype. Likewise, I'm hearing about how this is going to transform computing for people with certain disabilities, when they've apparently just bought the same Dragon software you've been able to buy for years (for transcription, the Siri stuff is apparently semi-distinct). Don't get me wrong, I like that I can already call up songs in my car by voice with my $100, no-contract, chinese-branded, 600Mhz ARM11 Android phone with a 3rd party, free, ad-supported app. (I amuse myself by practicing my french pronunciation with it too) The gushing just gets a bit old, as does the speculation about what magical powers the A5 must have to enable such wizardry.

saturdaysaint 15y ago
I don't think Facetime's first year was a good measure of it's longer term outlook. The inability to use it with any past iOS products severely limited the launch impact - you were limited to whoever was buying the iPhone 4. With the 4S, just about everyone on an iOS device will have Facetime, and iMessage is obviously an effort to further this sense of a BBM-style device "club" among one's peers.
- jonknee 15y ago
  A lot of people have Macs. Plus Steve said that FaceTime was going to be an open standard, but that never happened. If they thought the network effect was a problem, they sure haven't tried solving it.
ugh 15y ago
The two features aren’t really comparable. It makes no sense to compare the two.

Angostura 15y ago

"I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri." Perhaps. But I as a tech person find it magical. But I showed the video of Siri in action to my wife and she had an immediate, visceral hatred of the idea of talking to the phone like that "If I want to set a bloody alarm, I'll tap the set alarm button thank you". For context, she's not a luddite, she's tech savvy, though not into tech or its own sake. But I don't think she'll be alone, I think this is a feature that many non-tech people will loathe initially, perhaps for reasons they cannot articulate.

brador 15y ago
I'd suggest this is due to the necessity to "converse" with Siri. I don't want to pretend I'm talking to a human when talking to a phone because if I'm on a train/plane I'd look like an idiot. Instead, if it could understand something along the lines of: "alarm, 5.30, tomorrow" that'd be much better, quicker and simpler than: "Siri, set my alarm for 5.30am tomorrow morning". I don't want to have a conversation with my phone. Get in, get it done, get out. Speed always wins. But then I hate the new dumbed down Google too so what do I know eh. Siri will flop, the speed is a non-issue for the majority of iPhone owners and the camera just about brings the phone up to spec with it's competitor cameras. If they went for a an iPhone 5 and iPad3 they would have made an absolute killing this christmas.
- davidedicillo 15y ago
  "If they went for a an iPhone 5 and iPad3 they would have made an absolute killing this christmas." Yeah, instead they only pre-sold one million of them in 24h.
  - brador 15y ago
    Well, they may have allegedly pre-sold one million within 24 hours, but they certainly won't get my $1,000+, which still sits by my desk waiting for the iPad3 and iPhone 5. I know two others who won't be upgrading on either product too, so thats another $2,000. Small sample, yes, yet representative of the population I'd say if you exclude end of contract "forced" sales.

zerostar07 15y ago

My android phone has been begging me to talk to her for more than a year, but i refuse. It's still deep in the uncanny valley for me. You mentioned yourself that it might be useful in the car, where you are alone and nobody can hear you. Speech is disemmination, not simple message passing. It's literally shouting, when you really should only be whispering. If it was handwriting-recognition or some magical mind-reading or gesture-reading device i 'd use it.

dextorious 15y ago
To recap, you haven't tried Siri. > You mentioned yourself that it might be useful in the car, where you are alone and nobody can hear you. And what if people can hear you, in the street say? It's not like we don't already TALK to our phones all the time while walking in the street. You think it matters to passers-by if you talk to your boss or Siri? > It's literally shouting, when you really should only be whispering. Huh? What do you mean with this bizzaro comparison?
- zerostar07 15y ago
  It's all a matter of least effort. I can imagine a few situations where it's handy, but most times the gain in effort to setup a reminder for example is offset by the inappropriateness of the situation. It becomes net positive at times when your hands are not available (the promo video shows people running, cooking, driving)

jonknee 15y ago

> "Call Dave Jobs Mobile" This can be done on iPhones through the regular Voice Control feature in iOS 4. I use it frequently to change music while walking (holding the middle button on my headphones activates Voice Control).

slantyyz 15y ago
Voice Control sucks for me, especially with ethnic names.