Apple has done it again.  They did it with the Macintosh, they did it with the iPhone, and they’re doing it again with the iPhone 4S.  By “it” I mean re-defining the way we interact with technology, and their method of choice this time around? Siri, your “humble personal assistant”.  Is it hyperbole to put Siri on the same level as the graphical user interface, or multi-touch? It might seem so, but Siri brings us strikingly close to the future promised in Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video from 1987, which was strangely enough, set in 2011.

Been There, Done That

Voice control is hardly new, even for apple.  They’ve had voice control on their Macs for years, and even the iPhone has had voice commands for a long time.  Others would point out that Google’s Android operating system has had sophisticated voice control for over a year now. But the trick isn’t just controlling your computer with your voice; the trick is doing it in a way that seems natural.  Natural language control of computing is one more step to democratizing computing, and making it that much more accessible to the masses.  When you can tell your computer “I’m hungry, what can I eat?” and you get the answers you want, the computer has come that much closer to being a true assistant, and not just a tool.

Answers not Search

The key to Siri’s magic is that much of its power is not about searching, it’s about getting answers.  We’ve gotten used to “Googling it” to find out what we want.  We type in our search, look through a bunch of links, and click on the one that looks most promising.  Siri cuts through a lot of that process by letting you ask a question, and bringing up the best response, whether that means setting an alarm, finding your missing friend, or suggesting a good sushi place.  And as Siri gets hooked into more and more data sources, the idea of hunting through links to get an answer to your question will start to seem ridiculous.

Early Days

Speaking of missing data sources, it’s still early days for Siri. Unlike Google, Apple rarely puts a “Beta” tag on products it releases to the public, and the fact that Siri is called out as a Beta lets you know that even Apple considers it a work in progress. Once Siri can call answers from more data sources, and learn to interpret more and more natural language phrases, the system will become even more useful and powerful, and you’ll probably see a big marketing push from Apple.  In the meantime, this is a pretty good start.

Wrap Up

Apple has a knack for taking existing technologies (the graphical user interface, touchscreen computing, voice control) and tweaking them in a way that makes them remarkably human, and well-suited for use by actual people. Siri is the next step in their ongoing mission to democratise computing. Someday soon, it will be pretty common to see people having conversations with their computer, and for the first time in history, thanks to Apple, most of them will be perfectly sane.