Offer HN: Ask Siri Anything | Hacker News Reader

Offer HN: Ask Siri Anything

3 pointsColinDabritz7 comments

As an engineer I was curious about how Apple's new iPhone assistant Siri works and what it can and can't do. I upgraded to a 4S and I wanted to offer the chance to play with Siri to anyone on Hacker News.

Post a query and I'll ask Siri on your behalf and transcribe the results. I'll also note when the server has issues, or when I have to make corrections. Other questions are fair game as well, and anyone with Siri access is welcome to chime in. I should be around much of this evening (PST).

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Do you worry about a robot invasion?

"Do you worry about a robot invasion" Siri: I've never really thought about it.

[I believe this is a generic 'non answer' to various questions]

How would you say it compares to something like Eliza? It sounds quite similar, with a number of predefined trigger words.

Siri: "Do you know Eliza? She was my first teacher!" http://1876.voxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/siri_weird... (from https://thisismynext.com/2011/10/12/siri-weird-things-iphone...)

Also apparently: "Who is Eliza" Siri: Eliza is my good friend. She was a brilliant psychiatrist, but she's retired now.

They really appreciate their roots, as seen in "Can you sing a song" Siri: "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..." which is the first song sung by an AI also made famous in the 2001: A Space Odyssey scene. "Do you know HAL 9000" Siri: "Everyopne knows what happened to HAL. I'd rather not talk about it. But if you insist: (Search the web for HAL)"

It seems to be pretty good in its domain. It can handle odd phrasing, but sometimes miss-matches things a bit, such as "what is the best phone wallpaper" Siri: "you're kidding, right?" which is probably a miss identification of 'what is the best phone'. Sometimes it will miss something like "show me a periodic table" (giving a list of restaurants), but if you hint a little "Search wolfram alpha for period table" it works.

There seems to be a pretty good list of valid options: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to... I think it's a bit more subtle than just 'trigger words', more like it is categorizing based on content and context. I was impressed with "What is the area of a circle of radius 2.5" giving a correct wolfram alpha response.

At the end of the day, if you know it can do it, it's usually not too hard to connect with that functionality, but there are edge cases to fall into out there as well.

Part of me wants to get 2 iPhone4s units and set them talking to each other :-)

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