Scott Forstall took the stage today with what is most definitely the sweetest feature of the iPhone 4s and subsequently iOS 5 in geneeral. The integration of Siri is, for lack of a better term, amazing. Scott had a blast doing a fairly extensive demo of the iPhone’s plain language assistant. With just your voice, you now have an infinite amount of data using plain language.
To enable Siri, you simply hold down the home button and your assistant jumps into action! “What can I help you with?” From there, the sky appears to be the limit. Scott began getting us warmed up with requests like:
“Find me a great Greek restaurant in Palo Alto.”
Siri quickly snaps back with an intuitive plain text response:
“I found 14 Greek restaurants, 5 of them are in Palo Alto and I’ve sorted them by rating.”
So if we break down what has just happened in that short little vocal exchange, Scott just piloted his phone to Google by location, then search for Greek restaurants, and then have the iPhone show him them based on rating. Pretty impressive for speking a few words to your phone.
Some of the other amazing ways to interact include setting up location based appointments by simply citing:
“Remind me to call my wife when I leave work.”
Or perhaps you need to do a little research on the fly:
“Search Wikipedia for Neil Armstrong.”
I imagine you are already as excited as I am and that doesn’t even embody any of the phone feature integration! You can even interact with iMessages and your phone with your voice:
“Tell Susan I’ll be right there.”
One of the most popular queries demoed though, has to be:
“How do I get home?”
Which is intuitive enough for you to figure out what happens next.
All in all, the integration of Siri into iOS 5 is really well thought out and I can’t wait to get my hands… err.. voice on it, though it appears I’ll have to wait until the 14th, as Siri will only work on the iPhone 4S.
