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Comment by ernestipark | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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