Siri, Will You Ever Come to iPad?
Clearly, iOS users of all stripes are intrigued by Siri, but as we reported, Apple’s new digital assistant is slated for the iPhone 4S alone.
A recent piece in Ars Technica looked at the future of Siri, with an eye on where this intriguing technology might crop up next. Are the pundits predicting Siri will find its way to iPad?
Siri uses voices recognition to send messages, check the weather, or add notes to a calendar. The app’s speech-to-text capabilities come from Nuance, the company that created Dragon dictation software. Judging from Siri’s promotional video, Apple has gone to great lengths to make Siri seem more conversational than the average bot one might encounter during a telephone call with a bank or airline.
An app this powerful needs a robust processor to run, which is one reason why Siri is limited to the iPhone 4S. Apple’s newest phone sports a dual-core A5 processor, which is the same technology found in the iPad 2.
So, what’s stopping Siri from migrating to the iPad? It helps to understand how Siri answers all those questions and performs its tasks. It turns out that Siri isn’t just listening to you, it’s also constantly checking with Nuance’s servers. After all, Siri isn’t omniscient; the answers still have to come from somewhere.
Without a constant Internet or 3G connection, which is something many iPads (in contrast to iPhones) still consistently lack, Siri is rendered powerless.
Additionally, Siri requires a high quality microphone to maximize the accuracy of its speech recognition. The iPad lacks the additional secondary microphone which is used to filter background noise that the iPhone 4 and 4S sport.
So, even if iPad owners can think of a million things they’d like Siri to do, they may have awhile to wait.
Despite the excitement about Siri, even the experts can’t agree about its ultimate affect on consumers and the mobile tech marketplace.
In a recent note to clients, Shannon Cross, analyst for Cross Research, wrote, “the use of natural language and potentially the ability to distinguish between voices could one day change the way we interact with electronic devices and provide a substantial technology advantage to Apple. Quite simply, we have not seen a demonstration of comparable AI in any other consumer system.”
Visual artist supervisor Michael Okuda is more skeptical, pointing to the limits of voice-based control as the likely culprit in constraining Siri’s utility. “Imagine I’m looking at some photos, and I want to say, ‘Up, up, left, down one, photo number 3362, no, the one on the left.’” he said. Okuda believes voice input is inherently inefficient for more complex tasks where pointing and tapping is actually faster, saying “Natural language is, I think, going to have some significant limitations.”
Whether Siri is truly a life-changing technology that will integrate AI more fully into our daily lives or another tantalizing technical innovation that flames out remains to be seen. Regardless, getting the most out of Siri will require its human users to learn which tasks we can offload onto it without compromising the results.