New York Time runs catty article about Siri
ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Based on this article – which pretends dictation devices and, later software, have not been used for more than a century by countless doctors, lawyers and businessmen – The Stiletto concludes that Apple iPhone 4S voice-activated assistant, Siri, is on the New York Times sh*t list for not having the location of every abortion clinic on the tip of its virtual tongue (a “glitch,” the tech giant insists):
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
[T]he etiquette of talking to a phone – more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S – has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. …
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.
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