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If you have been waiting for the moment that you will finally get your hands on the new iPhone 4s, you will know about Siri. And now that the iPhone 4s is in South Africa, you know its close.
You will know that Siri is the brand new feature from Apple, only available on the iPhone 4s, and is being dubbed a Virtual PA.
With Siri, you can now use voice commands to do daily tasks like scheduling meetings, composing emails, creating contacts, or simply checking the weather.
This is going to revolutionise the way that we work, especially for people that are on the go non-stop from 8 to 5. We will now have the ability to manage our diary entirely, with one touch of the phone, simply to activate Siri, and she will do the rest.
If you have the time, and bandwidth, check out this video taken at the Keynote in October, showing exactly how functional Siri is. It’s about 15 minutes long.
What makes Siri stand out from many, many other voice recognition apps available for the iDevices, is that it does not use a crazy syntax where you need to include certain semi-natural keywords before the command will work. Siri actually allows you to simply talk to (with?) your phone. Naturally the more you use it the better she picks up your manner of speaking, and I think in South Africa, she is going to have her hands full, with out strong accents.
It is understandable that from the moment it went live in the States in October, people have been learning how to make Siri do things that she was never meant to, even hacking Siri to work on earlier iPhones and even Android handsets.
Some of the amazing things that Siri has learnt to do, whether intended or not, in her short 3 months with us so far include:
Starting and stopping the engine of a Viper sports car. [Video]
Closing Curtains, Activating fans and switching off lights. [Video]
Integrating Siri into a reminder application, Remember the Milk. [Video]
Control your Media Centre to play all your favourite TV Shows. [Video]
Play the piano like Beethoven? Yip, Siri can do it. [Video]
It seems like the options are endless!
Granted, most of these Siri tricks require the use of a Siri Poxy Server, it is not too difficult to set up (Stay tuned for a post on Jailbreaking and Siri Proxies soon).
Apple will more than likely be sitting back taking all of these tips in to make them officially available in the final release for Siri. They were very clever in this aspect, by releasing Siri only in the Beta mode on the iPhone 4s, it allows almost a year to perfect before releasing the final version in the iPhone 5.
There is talk that Siri will soon be able to control our TV’s too with not only voice, but hand/body gestures too. Expect a post on the up and coming Apple iTV shortly.
If you’ve had your hands on Siri as yet, post your experiences here and let us know how she is fairing.
Otherwise, enjoy!