“Early reviews of the iPhone 4S may have been uniformly great, bordering on glowing. But the best part of Wednesday’s coverage of Apple’s latest has been reviewers’ transcripts of their conversations with Siri — the personal assistant,” Hayley Tsukayama reports for The Washington Post. “Initial reports revealed that Siri’s got answers for just about everything from pop culture queries to math problems. She’s even got an answer to the eternal question, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ that pays homage to Monty Python. But she’s also shown she has a good sense of humor.”
“When Macworld’s Jason Snell sent a jab Siri’s way by asking her to ‘open the pod bay doors,’ a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s classic ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ the personal assistant responded, ‘We intelligent agents will never live that down, apparently,'” Tsukayama reports. “Over at The Loop, Jim Dalrymple expressed his love for Siri, causing her to admonish him, ‘I hope you don’t say that to those other mobile phones, Jim.'”
Read more in the full article, including how Siri could be about to begin saving many lives, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dale Eckerman” for the heads up.]
i thought open the pod bay doors was from star trek?
Getting younger by the day, eh? ‘Open the pod bay doors, HAL’ is, well, iconic.
Seriously? You’ve never seen 2001?
I want to take you by the hand and show you this movie. It is the definitive science fiction epic that happens to explore artificial intelligence in what is still likely the most accurate depiction of future computers ever. OMG it is old but it ihasn’t aged. It is even more fascinating to watch now when you consider many of the cultural predictions embedded within. 2010 was a halfway decent sequel also.
Kubrick didn’t have the scientific chops to invent Lunesta, so he did the next best thing with the skills he had.
J
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, ask for it by name. Directed by the great Stanley Kubrick. It is astounding how far they jumped ahead in the art of visual effects for that movie. You can onlyimagine the sensation that it was in the 60’s, playing for months and months on end in roadshow exlusive engagements (only in a handful of theaters spread few and far between, unlike today). VFX visionaries like Doug Trumbull and Con Pederson developed amazing techniques for the film. Even now the film inspires.
Great Movie, featuring Facetime, iPads, and more… in 1968, no less.
Awwww. I wanted to discover these on my own.
The meaning of life question (and answer) is from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, not Monty Python. An egregrous error and one that Siri is not likely to make.
The Meaning of Life is the title of a Monty Python Movie.
The Ultimate Question, you know, Life, the Universe, Everything, that’s from THHGTTG. The Meaning of Life is indeed a Monty Python movie.
42
So Siri was invented to give us the question to that answer. I guess that means Earth only has a little time left before its blown to bits, just before the question is delivered?
What does it say the most useful thing in the world is? A towel or an iPhone?
Siri, I’ve been bonking the brains out of Minka Kelley solidly for the past 6 hours. What do you think of that?
I think you need to buy Minka a pair of crutches.
Siri, you don’t think I should run the New York marathon next year?
Not unless Minka were coupled to you from the get go.
Siri, you’re a genius.
I hope they let me change Siri’s voice to Minka’s soon. With the phone on vibrate and Minka’s voice, I’ll never leave the house.
Before we get carried away, it might be that many of these answers are being pulled from WolframAlpha. Go ahead, just try: What is the meaning of life at that site or many of these questions.
It could also be that Siri sports a wicked sense of AI humour, but we just aren’t sure if it’s Siri or the servers it’s hitting for the answers yet.
It’s impossible to pull text answers from Wolfram Alpha… that site returns a bitmapped answer to prevent web crawlers, spiders and bots from scanning its results.
but they said that Wolfram Alpha was closely linked to Siri….
so……
Just a thought,
en
Unless, Apple has obtained a back-end access license from Mr. Wolfram. From what I have heard, Siri has been pulling certain answers only from WA and Yelp.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=open+the+pod+bay+doors
Can’t wait till I get my 4S…
1 month to go.
The more I hear of SIRI the more I want the iPhone 4S.
I would be interesting if Apple is building up some sort of answer database on its servers so in time SIRI will get smarter or can answer complicated questions faster. What puzzles me the most is that I continue to hear that the Google Voice Assistant is so much better than SIRI and yet Google or partners don’t try to leverage this feature on their smartphones in the media the way that Apple is doing. I don’t know anyone with an Android smartphone that is raving about using a voice assistant for input. The fact is that there are still a lot of Android smartphones coming out with physical keyboards so it doesn’t seem as if voice input is that powerful a feature on Android devices.
interested in where you keep hearing goggle voice is so much better. it has a totally different method of sourcing answers which seem to be limited to preset categories.
Yes, and since the iPhone 4S hasn’t been released yet, all those people claiming Google Voice Assistant is so much better have no idea what they’re talking about because they have never tried Siri as implemented in iOS 5 on an iPhone 4S.
When someone is jealous of something that is better than what they have, the first thing they do is try to tear it down.
BTW, just noticed the auto-correct in OS X Lion (upgraded last night), which works very similar to iOS. Sweet!
You’re right: Android is a POS and they know it. Android Idiots are like their aunties bragging that their fake Vuitton bags are better than the original. Android is a shoddily-constructed, counterfeit OS.
I’m rather enjoying the auto-correct in Lion too.
Siri = Steve Is Really Inside
wonder why it took you all so long to come up with this…
Sheer brilliance. I’ll never think of SIRI the same way again. It’d be too weird to have Steve’s voice as SIRI, wouldn’t it? Too soon?…
Actually, I once asked Siri the app, pre-iOS5, why it was called ‘Siri’ and it responded “I’m just made this way.” which is actually more impressive than it seems.
Why aren’t more people demanding / requesting this technology on other Apple devices?
Let’s see if we can get Al Franken to form a committee to investigate why Apple is withholding this technology from other Mac users. (Please, no political flames. It’s just a harmless joke.)
At least he shows up and tries to get to the bottom of things, unlike many of our other elected representatives (from any party). Not that some of his choices of causes to spend taxpayer money “investigating” are the best.
Because no one has tried it out yet. Can’t get it until Friday.
Then the demands will come, and I’m sure Apple is working on a version for OS X.
Yes, but what is the “nature” of the universe?
Hal: ‘Dave, will I dream?’
Dave: ‘Yes Hal, you will dream of Siri’. 🙂
Ahhh… but does SIRI dream of Electric Sheep?
Yes, in Marathon Infinity
Responses will vary to the same question.
Here are more examples:
http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/12/siri-weird-things-iphone-4s/
the meaning of LIFF – douglas adams