Monday, October 17, 2011

Initial Musings

I haven't saved any screen shots of my interactions with Siri yet, but I promise to do so and they will form the basis for my future blog posts.  However, the very first time I met Siri, I asked her to call my wife.  I had saved my wife's contact information in my address book as Sexy Mama (she's a mama.  she's sexy; ergo, she's sexy mama).  So I told Siri, "Call sexy mama."

Siri thought about it for a few seconds and then listed my inquiry as "Sexy mamma" and told me, "Mark, there are no adult stores in the area....."

Sure wish I had a screen shot for that one!



2 comments:

  1. You could always ask the question again and then capture it that time!

    But your BLOG is exactly what I was afraid of. I'm profoundly deaf in one ear, and the good ear isn't a whole lot better. I'm also told that I'm from a foreign country because of my funky deaf accent. I was even in California one year, shopping at a mall near Disneyland, and the cashier (obviously used to hearing accents from all over the world!), just point blank asked me: "Cool accent! What country did you come from?"

    I was like "Country?" (I'm an American!!)... and at the time all I could stammer out was, "...uh well, I was born in Oklahoma but I live in Kansas."

    This BLONDE then says, "Wow, where's that!?"

    I couldn't believe her. She was in California and did not realize Kansas and Oklahoma were other states in the USA where California was from?? So I told her to go straight out east a thousand miles or so to Nebraska, hang a right and go south and she'd run right into Kansas and Oklahoma..." and then left. Very fast.

    Sooo

    Recently I was at the AT&T store to see if I could chat with a live model of the 4S, to see if it would understand me. No dice, none in the store yet. I was fixing to be out of town the day of the release, and my 3G desperately needs to be upgraded. I'm a year past my 2 year contract fulfillment.

    So the gal told me I could download vLingo and it would give me essentially the same voice recognition experience as a 4S. I told her I only had a 3G and I only had OS 3.8 or so. She didn't think it would matter. I downloaded it. My stupidity was in not trying to open it in the store. I just opened it later, and it wouldn't fully open. It has never opened. It starts to go into the opening sequence and then crashes back to the Home Screen. The download page on iTunes says nothing about requiring 4.0 or greater OS but I suspect that's the case.

    So, I'm still back to where I was, and plan to go to the store at some point and try again to chat with a 4S and see if it can understand me.

    Is there anything in the documentation that indicates any pretense of Siri attempting to "learn" her new owner's deaf accent?

    I've read on other blogs that the Scottish people can't get their 4S's to understand them at all, hearing or deaf!!

    Anyway your screen shots are funny!!

    Thanks for putting this up and heading me off at the pass. I may just settle for the 4 and forget the 4S.

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  2. MsDrPepper --

    Thanks for your comments. We've all had our run-ins with people who think our accents hail from somewhere else. I've even had someone look at my CI and ask me if it was a "new fangled cell phone".

    I should caution you, though, that I'm not trying to put anyone off from buying the 4S because Siri is hopelessly clueless, no. Aside from all the other major upgrades in the 4S, Siri does work every once in awhile if I keep my commands simple. And I can also manually correct the command.

    I've often thought about whether my manual corrections would "program" Siri to understand me better, but for laugh's sake, I've declined to do that.

    Keep reading!

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