3 ms·
To me, the main shortcomings, at the moment, as a UK customer, are the male voice (seriously... I want the nicer american female voice... it subconsciously anno
by swombat 15y ago
To me, the main shortcomings, at the moment, as a UK customer, are the male voice (seriously... I want the nicer american female voice... it subconsciously annoys me to think of "Siri" as a British male) and, perhaps more importantly, the fact that Siri won't connect to Yell/GMaps/etc in the UK yet, so I can't emerge out of the tube and ask "How do I get to 123 Some Street?" and be presented with a map. I'm not quite sure why that doesn't work in the UK - surely, the interfaces to Google Maps and even Yell don't differ by country.
Despite those, it is already very useful. I'm using the timer all the time ("Set a timer for 3 minutes", "Wake me up in 20 minutes", "Wake me up at 7am tomorrow"), and the weather ("What's the weather like tomorrow?"), and using it to set meetings ("Add event 'drinks with Enrico' at 6pm on Friday").
The real killer, imho, will be the integration with services. The voice recognition seems good enough, the "parsing what you mean" could be improved but is good enough. What makes or breaks Siri is the integration with services. The timer/reminders/calendar integration is extremely smooth and so it is great and a huge help. Bits that aren't integrated (e.g. Twitter) or less well integrated (e.g. sending SMS's), less so.
All in all, a great start, and useful from day one, though, like all new Apple products, there's plenty of room for improvement. I'm waiting to see where they take it - unlike some other companies, Apple do have a reputation for relentlessly pushing forward after releasing an initial, "it doesn't do much but it does it well" device.
- Lewisham 15y agoDo you know if you can set the British English of Siri independent of the phone language? As a Brit in the US, my Android phone doesn't understand anything I say unless I say it in a so-bad-its-almost-xenophobic American accent. Same with my car. YouTube videos indicate that Siri does understand British accents, but if I have to set the phone language to full on British, that would be a bit annoying (sadly, it is now tires, color, favorite and temperatures in Farenheit for me).
- nirvana 15y agoYes. The Siri Settings screen has a language choice that is Siri specific. I'm pretty certain that Siri, like most open ended recognition systems has separate recognizers for various accents, and of course, languages. (Though Apple has apparently set Siri's responding voice using the same control, they probably should have made them separate settings.) http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like-screenshot-video-apple-release/ http://techbend.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-siri-look-like-scre... You can also turn off voice feedback if the British Male voice annoys you as well.
- X-Istence 15y agoI really like the Australian accent, but as soon as I turn that on Siri will no longer find any businesses that are close to me since that is only supported if set to US English.
- Lewisham 15y agoYes, I just popped down to the store to try this out. It's a bizarre limitation... the phone knows where it is, why should it matter if I want to speak to it in Australian/British English/Spanish?
- mechanical_fish 15y agoa so-bad-its-almost-xenophobic American accent I sense a new genre of Youtube videos, just waiting to be born. If the videos use paired examples ("just listen as the Londoner and the New Yorker swap phones") maybe they'll be inoffensive enough that one dares to show them in polite company. Probably not, though. ;)