Daring Fireball: The iPhone 4S

I don't think we (tech people) appreciate just how magical the public is going to find Siri.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] Funny typo - I meant to type Dave Jones. Only noticed this on rereading the post.

Me: “Set an alarm for 9 AM.”<p>Siri: “It’s set for 9 AM.”<p>Me: “Change that to 10 AM.”<p>Siri: “I changed your alarm to 10 AM tomorrow.”<p>Me: “Cancel that alarm.”<p>Siri: “I deleted your 10 AM alarm.”<p>Me: “Thank you, Siri.”<p>Siri: “Your wish is my command.”<p>It seems this thing is really fun to use. I can't wait to try it out.

Even though Siri seems to be amazing I wonder whether people will use it much in practice. Voice is intrusive in the environment and annoying to people who aren't part of the conversation. Sitting next to someone conversing on the phone in a public space can be irritating but imagine how jarring it will be if the person next to you barks commands out loud at random intervals.<p>Him: "Remind me to pick up my dry cleaning."<p>You: "Huh? You talking to me? No..."<p>Later: "After picking up my dry cleaning, I want you to book me a flight to Tucson"<p>You: "I'm finding another seat..."

I wonder how they'll handle different grammar constructions in different languages.<p>For example, in English, "Text my girlfriend that I'm coming home later" would send a message with "I'm coming home later".<p>However, in Dutch, saying the same thing "SMS mijn vriendin dat ik later thuiskom" should result in a text with the content "Ik kom later thuis", requiring labeling all parts of the sentence.

How to determine which of the several 3rd party API's to use seems pretty straight-forward to me:<p>Me: Search for Japanese food.<p>Siri: I found these 5 results on Yelp nearby.<p>Me: Search for Japanese food on Foursquare.<p>Siri: I found these 8 results on on Foursquare nearby.<p>If you explicitly request a certain service often enough, then Siri should start to default to it. That's exactly what a real world personal assistant would do. In fact, Apple doesn't have to be that creative. Just do what a real personal assistant would do in any given situation and you should be good.<p>Also, I would really like some reviewer mention if the iPhone 4S has less of a rolling-shutter issue as the previous iPhones do.

Does anyone know how well Siri performs if your accent is from outside of the States?

As a keen cyclist I'm really looking forward to trying Siri, but after reading the footnote I can now actually see myself using it anytime:<p>"You might wonder, Hey, don’t you feel like a jerk walking around the city talking to your phone? But here’s the thing: Siri, by default, kicks in when you hold the iPhone up to your ear, so you can talk to it and it looks like you’re on a phone call."

Siri paves the way for the <i>display-less phone</i>† - smaller, lower energy use<p>Context switching could be done like short-cuts: when you open an app it captures (most) shortcuts; and you can reallocate short-cut bindings. These are easy improvements. Just think of both voice and touch interfaces as having grammars.<p>Wolfram|Alpha's natural language interface is endlessly annoying for me - I think Siri would also get into trouble with more complex requests (but there's plenty of value in it before that limitation comes into play)<p>†this neologism could well go the way of the <i>horse-less carriage</i>

The humor in some of the responses is a really nice touch; perhaps something I didn't expect from Apple, who is fairly straight-down-the-line with their dialogs and software.<p>Saying that, it's actually appreciated, and does a great job at attempting to establish an emotional tie with the user.

"The most profound difference between the 4S and 4 cameras has nothing to do with image quality. It’s that you don’t have to wait nearly as long. [...] Even better, image quality is better, too."<p>Jeez Gruber, make up your mind :P

Does anyone know if there are cues that remind the end user to use Siri? (eg. "you haven't used Siri in a week," or something of that nature). This feature, since it is primarily hidden behind the home button, might be forgotten by the average user.<p>As Mr. Gruber stated, once he got it into his workflow, he missed it when it was gone. However, I think one of the biggest hurdles to mass adoption will be getting it into the workflow of the average user.<p>Anyone have ideas of how to address this problem? Or do you think the product video is enough?

Loved the ending. "The one and only disappointment I have with the iPhone 4S is that the shutdown spinner animation is still low-res. That’s pretty low on the list of nits to pick."

Shame it can't read emails, but then I guess there is so much crap in an email it just wouldn't read well...

I just hope it can handle accents or at least learn to handle them over time.

So is it legal to hold the phone to your ear and talk to Siri while driving?

An even smaller nit to pick is that nits are ordered by size, not count.

Siri was originally an App, but it took a huge amount of effort to get it to work. I believe the reason the feature is exclusive to the iPhone 4S is due to hardware.<p>Apple said the processor in the iPhone 4S is the A5. This may be the exact same chip in the iPad 2, or it might be the same <i>class</i> of chip. Apple doesn't detail the internals of their processors, so they can make device specific versions and call them the same thing if they want. Thus, this A5 could have co-processors in it that didn't exist in the one for the iPad 2. Specifically, I remember there begin something about an image co-processor that the camera uses, and it seems logical that there might be some video encoding or at least video feature extraction being done in hardware to enable 1080p video. (a big step up from 720p).<p>There may well be a feature extraction engine in the A5 to turn the audio recording of your voice into a series of symbols that are much more efficient to send over the wire to the SIRI service.<p>But, even if there are no co-processors, voice recognition is a very CPU intensive process, and the A5 has another CPU in it, as well as a greatly improved GPU. Either or both may be required for the current version of SIRI (which is more complete than the original) to work.<p>Thus it literally may be the case that Siri wouldn't run on the iPhone 4.

Well, it's Apple's next model since the Grip of Death problem, and no word if it's fixed.<p>Talking to my phone is nice, and so is a fast camera, but it's tragic that this beautiful sleek device has to be wrapped in an ugly rubber band for me to make a call!<p>[Edit] Well, this article says it's been fixed with two antennas. I really don't like how they downplay the problem and act like it only affects ham-fisted gorillas. When I have just two bars, griping the bare metal with four fingers is enough to make the signal too weak for communication.<p><a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394178,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394178,00.asp</a>