That's incredibly cool, but I think Gruber's point about the problems of third party integration will prove to be crucial.
Me: "Set my facebook status to getting ready to ride the roller coaster at Six Flags."
Siri: ...
Me: "Are there any headlines about my startup on the front page of Hacker News?"
Siri: ...
Me: "What Kindle books do I have on HTML 5?"
Siri: ...
Me: "Play me the latest episode of Glee on Netflix."
Siri: ...
Some of these, like Facebook, could be handled by smart first-party integration by Apple. But in general, any time a new use case comes along, first party integration is going to lag way behind, if it's implemented at all.
I don't mean to rag on Siri -- it's an incredibly cool technology even today, and it apparently works amazingly well. But the more things you can do by picking up the phone and using the touch interfsce that you simply can't do at all with the voice interface, the less I think it will slot right into people's lives and become how they interface with their phone.
Totally agree here, if this sort of thing gets worked out, I would feel like the future is here. I kind of see a naive way to make an api around that, but the trick to me would make it generic and adaptable enough to allow such a broad range of functionality, as well as conflict handling in a graceful manner. I am totally intrigued...
Me: "Set my facebook status to getting ready to ride the roller coaster at Six Flags."
Siri: ...
Me: "Are there any headlines about my startup on the front page of Hacker News?"
Siri: ...
Me: "What Kindle books do I have on HTML 5?"
Siri: ...
Me: "Play me the latest episode of Glee on Netflix."
Siri: ...
Some of these, like Facebook, could be handled by smart first-party integration by Apple. But in general, any time a new use case comes along, first party integration is going to lag way behind, if it's implemented at all.
I don't mean to rag on Siri -- it's an incredibly cool technology even today, and it apparently works amazingly well. But the more things you can do by picking up the phone and using the touch interfsce that you simply can't do at all with the voice interface, the less I think it will slot right into people's lives and become how they interface with their phone.