Who is SIRI ?

MDC enjoys the new Iphone5 with Siri.

The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English.

Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s three things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.

1) The obvious way to dictate in any app is to tap into a text field, like a text Message or Twitter field, which will bring up the keyboard. On an iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S, the little microphone icon will show up down in the left corner of the keyboard. Tap that and then begin to speak out loud, clearly and in a normal voice.

Apple recommends using punctuation, which makes a lot of sense — everyone’s intonation is different, and speech to text systems on the Mac OS take up a lot of processing power just to do that. Give Siri a break and just say the punctuation. Apple gives the following example (bold emphasis added by me):

Enter punctuation: Say the punctuation marks you wish to have inserted as they are needed.

For example, to dictate “Pick up the new iPad and suddenly, it’s clear,” say “Pick up the new iPad and suddenly comma it’s clear period.”

2) Being able to use your voice to find out the forecast for the next several days is a fantastic feature that more folks might use, if only they knew the right way to ask.

Try the following. Invoke Siri with a tap and hold on the Home button, and say, “What’s the weather for today?” Even better for those planning a trip out of doors tomorrow: ask, “What’s the weather for tomorrow?” or “Check next five-day forecast for Anchorage, AK.” Of course, you’ll want to insert your own city or region into that last bit, unless you want to find out how rainy it is here.

Siri can handle more abstract questions, as well, like “Will it rain in Seattle this week?” and
“How’s the weather in Houston right now?” She can also deal with forecast-specific language, like, “What’s the high for Anchorage on Thursday?” or “How windy is it out there?”

3) Some of my best friends love to keep track of sports scores, team rankings, and individual player statistics. If I get pulled into a conversation about sports with any of them, I’m totally pulling out my iPhone 5, and I’ll be able to keep pace with their conversation. Or, at least throw out tasty facts that will totally impress them.

Siri is a great personal assistant, helping you create reminders, text friends, and the like. But Siri also has a way of interpreting ordinary questions about things like, yes, sports. Here are some of the best ways to ask her for the latest updates on your favorite teams and sports.

Let’s start with a basic query about a specific baseball team, “How did the Mets do yesterday?” Siri returns “The Mets were downed by the Pirates yesterday; the final score was 10 to 6.” I applaud her use of the semi-colon; it’s often misused. How about them Dodgers, Siri? “The Dodgers lost a close one to the Padres yesterday; the final score was 2 to 1.” Poor Dodgers.

You can also ask about schedules. For example, “When is the next Giants game?” returned “The Giants – Eagles game is Sunday at 4:20 pm,” along with a nice little graphic of the game from Yahoo Sports. It’s nice to see Yahoo! getting some skin in the game, here, so to speak.

How is your favorite team doing? Just ask, “How are the Dodger’s doing?” and you’ll get a picture chart of the MLB teams, with the requested team’s standing in bold font. Nice touch.

Siri will even clarify your question. I asked, “When is the next Cardinals game?” To which, Siri replied, “Which Cardinals, St. Louis or Arizona?” When I said “Arizona,” she told me that the next Cardinals game was against the Vikings on Sunday at 1:05 pm. Good to know, Siri, thanks!

MDC also asked Siri, How’s Derek Jeter’s foot?  Siri said, Sorry the Yankees are done !