Silicon Superego

"In Citibank’s case, writing messages in that second-person conversational style forced the engineers to put themselves in the mind-set of real humans. You can’t write an 'I' statement for your ATM without also considering the logic, the terminology and the clarity of those messages. Someone writing in that frame of mind would never come up with 'The activation server determined that the specified product key has exceeded its activation count.'"

1. 'I' is first-person style, not second-person.

2. Citi having output in first-person is not worthy of this much praise. It wasn't that difficult.

3. The author is comparing apples to oranges. Error messages have a different intent than other normal user communication. The goal in an error message is to get the necessary info to the support person.

Finally, Siri is not impressive because of the way it talks, and it is only moderately impressive because it does an ok job of voice recognition- not even a great job- and it does this using an external service, which is much, much less impressive than it would have been if it were to be part of iOS without requiring an external service. But, voice recognition in devices is a positive trend, even if not novel, so hats off to Siri.