I know it’s a bit late for initial impressions, but it’s not overdue! In other words, it’s not a bit too late for me to give you my initial, first impressions of the all-mighty Siri. Unique to the newly released iPhone 4S, I’ll give you my thoughts of the powerful virtual assistant that was created to make your life a little easier.
Prioritized only to the iPhone 4S upon Apple’s announcement last week, (yes, there was a Siri application on the App Store) is Siri, a virtual assistant that should be able to do virtually anything. Since much wasn’t added physically to this year’s iteration of the iPhone, Apple expanded on the handset’s internal hardware, and Siri is undoubtedly the largest potential seller when it comes down to purchasing the iPhone 4S or not.
What makes this assistant so much different than other, comparable assistants of the same broad breed, is the fact that Siri incorporates iOS into its expansive knowledge – it will not only answer questions and such for you but will also take care of your requests such as setting alarms, making a note, queuing a reminder, etc. Unfortunately, it’s limited to the iPhone 4S and also limited to accessing information from Apple’s factory application instead of being able to interact with other third-party applications.
To access Siri, you need to enable [her] it through Settings—>General—>Siri. Thereon you simply hold down the iPhone 4S’ home button for 2-3 seconds, which will bring up a small window. You can further ask a question or questions.
Before, you were able to ask Voice Control to do things for you, such as to start playing your music or to call someone. This is similar with Siri, however, you can also tell it to accomplish tasks that you’d otherwise have to do manually. Rather than simply sending you to Safari, you can automatically make a search orally.
The problem with Siri was that it isn’t allowed to change things as such. Say you tell it to “set an alarm for 8 am.” This will create an alarm flawlessly, but then if you try to delete the alarm, you are faced with a response from Siri telling you that she’s not allowed to delete alarms. This, in a way, defeats the whole purpose of Siri. Further, you can’t tell it to open third-party applications, which was a real bummer for me.
When speaking normally, Siri seemed to recognize and pick up my voice perfectly fine. I even played music in the background and tried to ask questions while the TV was on to, to my surprise, receive a perfectly fine answer. On the contrary, however, Siri has been having difficulty understanding voices of other accents. Apple has promised an update sometime next year, which is a bit too far from now, personally.
Siri does provide an optimum way to waste a few spare minutes with its numerous, and many times snarky, responses. By asking peculiar questions, you can amuse yourself without fail. A website was already created to showcase all of the funny responses that you can get out of Siri, and there are a plethora of videos available on YouTube, which also show the same thing. You can visit
Even with Siri’s several flaws, which are completely expected considering the whole feature is really still in beta, I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that Siri isn’t useful; it’s great for situations such as creating calendar events, locating places, accomplishing a task while driving or when your hands are dirty and other such akin. The verdict: Siri functions as awesomely as it sounds, and I’d recommend upgrading to the 4S solely for this virtual, personal assistant that simplifies iOS.
*I’m really looking forward to using Siri with math equations – she’s great at computing.
