What I want Siri to be able to do for me | Hacker News Reader

What I want Siri to be able to do for me

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36 pointsdavidedicillo27 comments

this seems more like the one thing he wants Siri to have: an API for third-parties to integrate into their apps.

Was thinking the same exact thing. I don't know how Siri's internals work, but this could be tricky for Apple though. The accuracy of speech recognition can decrease with a larger set of keywords Siri has to check against.

An API for Siri makes me ponder the huge question: How will Apple assign sentences and queries in, shall we call it "Siri Space" to individual applications.

Siri – Check me in.

Does that go to Foursquare? American Airlines? The Ramada? Some Foursquare knockoff?

I can image a few solutions:

• Use a prefix or delegation clause to carve out a a realm of authority, but that is awkward. (the DNS works), but Siri have foursquare… sounds like you are talking to a finite state machine.

• Let developers say how confident they are that a sentence was for them based on current conditions and the winner gets it, but then the lying cheats would win.

• It could be thrown back in the user's face to disambiguate and then remember for future occurrences and good luck if you change your mind about priority at a later date.

• The invisible hand could be put to work and let developers rent concepts in Siri Space. That would likely provide a hitherto unseen form of grief and failure.

Remember it took a year to get native Apps after the iPhone came out. It will take no less time for the Siri masters to work out how or if developers can be mapped into Siri-space.

Or you could use clues like events in the user's calendar or recent emails to determine if there are any flights/hotels that need to be checked into, and ask from there.

Also: the article says: "Check me in here". This has much less ambiguity than simply "Check me in" does. It could look up which location-based apps you have installed, and then open up the one that you use the most.

There are plenty of ways to make magic happen :)

A simple solution could be :

- Apple has a limited set of "actions" that third party app can "suscribe" to ("checkin", "reminder", ...), like there is a limited set of multitasking capabilities

- Limit the number of Application that "suscribe" to an action (i.e: only 4 apps can checkin, if another app wants to suscribe, display a warning to the user so he disable other apps in settings, like for notifications)

- Prompt the user the first time "Where would you like to checkin", and remember the choice for future checkins. The user can also specify ("Check me in" - "I will check you in using Foursquare at ..." - "Use Facebook Places")

That sounds a lot like the Intents system on Android (and the web version, http://webintents.org/)

The behavior most consistent with Siri now would be "What would you like me to check you into?" "You want to check into ABC Business on Foursquare? Is that right?"

"Siri – Check me in. Does that go to Foursquare? American Airlines? The Ramada? Some Foursquare knockoff? "

Location could be some indicator perhaps??

Location is a good context indicator. User's calendar reservations can be another (if you are scheduled to fly in couple of hours, then the airline is probably what you mean).

A lot more on making apps smarter through context-awareness in http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

What Siri can do, But she is not ..!!

1. Voice Differentiation - Primarily this mean, Only I can open my Voice mails by commanding to Siri. Siri will determine there is no one but his master is commanding to open the Voice mails. We dreamt of an future where password will be replaced by your voice and specific commands. Pitch recognition will add lot many things, which Siri is not doing right now. This can give an edge to remember securely sensitive information to Siri.

2. Siri, please answer my Phone calls - as Siri is my personal assistant , She can take up the calls. On my behalf, and instead of the boring Voice mail , Siri can provide some useful info to the caller, or I can tel l Siri to give different messages to different group like Friends, Family and Office.

Number 2 would be awesome, and is what was "demoed" in the old Apple personal assistant video. This could start as a simple answering machine (no interaction with the caller) which would analyze the terms of the message, like appointment cancellation which would be matched against event in the calendar.

The possiblities are endless. Two ideas off the top of my head that aren't data search: 1. personal expense tracking: "just spent 30 dollars for gas". 2. mileage tracking: odometer reads 26312 miles.

A small trick to tweet with Siri (for the ones with unlimited text messages). Create a contact that has 40404 as phone number and you can text to Twitter your messages.

You can also use this trick for Facebook. Text "fb"(without quotes) to 32665. Then add contact 32665 naming it Facebook.

This was mentioned in the article.

Can Siri carry on a 'conversation' about one task? For instance, can she/it find a place in Maps then understand a command like "get directions there" to refer to said place? I don't have a 4S to test myself.

Annoyingly, Siri does not have maps support in Canada, so I can't test your example, but the answer in general is 'yes'. If you say, "Set a reminder", Siri will ask what you want it to be, and then will ask you what time it ought to be at. If she mishears your time, you can say, "No, at 9:00 AM", and she'll change the time.

It is impressive technology, but right now, my #1 thing I want Siri to do is understand me all of the time. I find the speech recognition is not as good as I had hoped, and I am frequently repeating myself and trying to enunciate more.

Probably because the Canadian accent is not currently supported - US, UK, Australia, if I remember correctly.

Except there is scarcely a difference between the accent of someone living in Michigan or Ohio or New York and someone living in Ontario - the accents are certainly much closer together than US vs. UK, for example. I just think the speech recognition needs more work.

There's currently no maps or business search anywhere other than the US.

With this specific example, it doesn't seem like that's the case. The best it can do is give you a list of restaurants based on your speech input, and then ask you to select one with your finger.

To an extent, yes. An example I ran into earlier - if you ask Siri to remind you of something on certain days, it will make an assumption about when to start that recurring reminder (based on how you word your request). I was then curious as to whether an interactive conversation would work, and said 'No, start it tomorrow instead' and it replied pretty naturally, affirming that she would have the reminder start tomorrow instead.

Yes, she understands context and can carry conversations in many situations, including the maps one that you described.

Is there any chance that Siri will be in the next version of OS X?

If I were a betting man I would say no. The primary reason would be Nuance. Something like Siri could be viewed by Nuance as direct competition against Dragon.

I'm hoping for Spotify integration! I've never bought digital music before, though now I am Spotify convert/subscriber. Unfortunately, Siri only interfaces currently with iTunes.

I'm sure Apple will provide some kind of Siri API eventually, but in the meantime I think something along the lines of Siri + email + ifttt could become pretty cool.

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