The iPhone Finds Its Full Voice: SIRI Artificial Intelligence in the iPhone 4S

Even though fans and pundits initially poo-pooed the latest iPhone as not having a sleeker look and a larger screen, here are three articles that talk about the hidden gem of this version, the Jetsons-like personal assistant named Siri.  You ask questions in a normal voice and a female voice answers you.  It's apparently better than previous voice recognition apps on the iPhone. 

The piece that is really interesting to me about this is how it affects the book publishing market. Our publisher Steve Piersanti says nobody reads books anymore, at least not cover-to-cover.  So imagine in a couple years that a digital reader downloads Leadership and Self-Deception from the iBookstore to her iPhone 6. She doesn't have time to actually read the book, so she opens it on her iBookstore shelf, and then asks the book and/or the author a few simple questions: "What are you about?", Why did you write the book?", "What do you want to me learn from this?" or a command such as "Give me the Top-5 takeaways."  Siri is programmed to answer them based on the content already provided by our BK Author Video series. The reader can also dive down by asking Siri to point to the chapter that tells more about a particular takeaway. Now the iPhone 6 reader knows what the book is about, and can go back and find out more if she needs to, but the whole Siri summarized-reading experience only lasted two or three minutes. Now that's speed reading!

David Pogue, New York Times product review: iPhone Conceals Pure Magic

MacRumors (Tech Crunch, Wired, etc.) Siri is "Straight Out of Scien...

Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal product review: The iPhone Finds...

As Jeevan said this morning, Tim Cook either intentionally or unintentionally downplayed this potential gamechanger in the product announcement last week on the day before Steve Jobs died.  Maybe that was scripted as the last transformative surprise from Steve before he left us. Maybe that's what the iPhone 4s reached 1 million in pre-orders before the product was even released.  The previous record for earlier versions of the iPhone was 400,000.

David Marshall