The term PDA has been around for many years now in a lot of different varieties. It means Personal Digital Assistant, and never before has there been an assistant that has been more personal than Siri. Siri is the biggest selling feature for the iPhone 4S. Described by Apple as an intelligent personal assistant, Siri is integrated in most of the native apps meaning that you can use her in everything that you do day to day. Here are a few reasons why Siri is a true PDA.
Personal:
When you first take the iPhone 4S out of the box and activate Siri you should enter your personal details into the phone. After this, Siri will call you by name and help you to find your way home or to work by adding these as locations. This makes her more personal, because you can call her by name and she can do the same to you. Adding locations also helps when you want to select location based reminders like “remind me to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home from work” or “when I get home remind me to message Brian”. When you leave or enter the set location, the reminder will be triggered.
She can also learn your family members over time so you don’t have to keep saying their full names. When you first give the command “call mom” Siri will ask who your mother is, and once you tell her she’ll never forget.
Digital:
Of course Siri is digital because she is a system inside your phone, but she is also tapped into the internet and other aspects of your phone to help you out. You can ask her what the weather will be this upcoming weekend and she will use the weather app on your phone and connect to the weather service via the internet. You can also ask her things like “When did Alexander Graham Bell die?” and she will look this up online using Wikipedia and Wolfram|Alpha.
Assistant:
You’ll find that Siri is the best assistant that you’ve ever had. She will read your new messages aloud as well as write down your replies. You can ask her to check your latest stock prices and the weather for the weekend. You can dictate notes, get her to set reminders, and ask her to work out a maths sum. She will even joke with you and learn more about you as time goes on. Using your iTunes play lists and previous calendar entries she will learn what you like and your tastes. Soon you can ask her to play your favourite song and she will be able to do this.
Siri is only in the beta stage so there will be more exciting features to come as well as a better understanding of different accents (she has some trouble with the Australian accent as well as some colloquialisms) as well as more integration to the third party apps. As for now, Siri is the best personal digital assistant around.
Mobile
