king talk

I am guilty of owning an iPhone 4S and I’m guilty of being excited about Siri. Recently John Pavlus wrote on Fast Company Design that Siri is the ultimate interface: none. So I’m asking myself: if it is the ultimate thing, why does it still feel so artificial to use? Turns out that usability is not so much about the input technology, but rather about trust.

It’s a bloody command line!

If you break it down, Siri is just a software that handles text input. It knows a certain set of commands that it can act upon. This puts Siri into one box with terminals or other language interfaces like Quicksilver or Enso.

The problem with command lines from a usability standpoint is that they are completely opaque – you do not know which commands the machine understands. Even worse, you have no idea what it will do if a command is misunderstood. That means that a command line is either perfect because it understands everything, or it sucks because it is unpredictable. Alas, I have yet to see a perfect command line interface.

Image by The Oatmeal

Siri is still a magnificent piece of technology. It understands more than any other such system (at least when the input language is set to English) and it can do incredible things. But ultimately, a technology is never judged by its merits, but by its flaws (or the lack thereof). Working flawlessly creates trust. But every misinterpreted result makes Siri a little less trustworthy.

Some days ago I hat the opportunity to check out Siri, an iPhone app which acts like your personal assistant and can be controlled mostly via speech recognition. It‘s really working pretty good, I have tested it and was really surprised. You can see a real test at this demo video. Unfortunately this App is US only. Siri acts like a real assistant, understands what you‘re saying, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time. Today, Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask it to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night. Siri is young and, like a child taking its first steps, may be awkward at times. This app may occasionally misunderstand things you ask it to do even within its range of understanding.

You can converse with Siri through combinations of spoken requests, typed keywords and phrases, or graphical user interface requests. As you express what you want to do in the way most comfortable to you, Siri applies a patented algorithm to sift through multitudes of possible interpretations, applying what it knows about your location, the time, your preferences, and your task context to determine the most probable understanding of your intent. Nonetheless, Siri will improve quickly by getting to know you better and understanding a broader set of tasks. In fact, right now, Siri’s learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions. Our vision is that, over time, you’ll trust Siri to manage many personal details in your life – from recommending a wine you might enjoy to managing your to do list.

Siri was finally aquired by Apple two months ago. Now that it is an Apple property, I don’t expect the virutal assistant technology to make its way on to competing devices — especially Android phones. Maybe we will find this gadget in other future Apple devices?