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Communicating with Siri: What Can I Help You With?

- January 7, 2014
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“What can I help you with?” This is the usual greeting that welcomes you if you are a user of an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5 model series. That is Siri speaking to you. Siri is an application for Apple Inc.’s iOS that makes use of a natural language user interface, which is able to respond to voice commands. Its usual function is to give assistance to users who seek actions and requests from various web services. Siri has been designed as a personal assistant and navigator with an intelligence that enables it to answer questions and deliver knowledge services derived from the Internet.

Word means lovely woman

Siri commonly has a female voice, although in recent Apple iOS features, you can actually choose to have either a male or female Siri voice by selecting from the given options in your device’s settings. “Siri” is a Norwegian word that means a lovely woman who helps someone attain victory. Siri was also given as the name of the first child of the application’s first developer. According to Apple, the program can be tweaked to suit the user’s personal preferences. As a result, the use of Siri has now become personalized in accordance to a user’s penchant for particular usage alternatives.

Original purpose

Originally, Siri was launched as a general application obtainable from the App Store as Siri, Inc. software. The primary purpose of Siri, Inc. was to make its service accessible by Blackberry and other phones operating with Android systems. However, when Apple purchased the software in 2010, Siri became exclusive to the company and all other plans to make it available for other operating systems were called off. Thereafter, Siri has become a fundamental module of iOS and became a feature of the iPhone 4S that hit the market in the last quarter part of 2011. Consequently, Siri was included in the third generation iPad alongside the release of iOS 6 and has since become part of all iOS tools from 2012 onward.

iPhone perk

Siri became first available in the United States’ Apple App Store. It is a useful feature that provides services like Google Maps, Open Table, TaxiMagic and Movie Tickets. These services significantly help users in obtaining resources about certain amenities or utilities that are necessary in daily life. For instance, when an individual needs directions to a particular destination or he has to get a ride in an unfamiliar place, Siri has always been handy.

Nuance and its service team provided the voice recognition system that was used in simulating Siri’s intelligence so that it can comprehend voice requests. Siri has now become a popular added iPhone feature, in which users can just talk to their phones when they want to make restaurant reservations or purchase movie tickets or get a taxi. Presently, Siri can distinguish English language although recent innovations on adapting the application to other languages are underway.

Difficult creation

Creating Siri was not a walk in the park. It took many years and a lot of computing and program decoding and design before Siri was finally born. Along with the birth of Siri, further software development on voice and language simulation has become a lot easier now. However, managing Siri can be a bit tricky sometimes. Technically, this voice prompter software revolves around a syntactical procedure that splits up a sentence into its syntax parts. For Siri to understand a voice prompt, the system undergoes a semantic processing that provides the meaning of messages that are fed to it. Overall, Siri is a valuable feature, although in some occasions, it can be precarious in comprehending the message that is sent to it. Be that as it may, in order to achieve best communication results with Siri, a speaker has to use proper English words. He must also be able to pronounce the words correctly in order for Siri to grasp the message.