Talking to Siri

I really love my iPhone - taking pictures, listening to music, playing games, staying organized.  Love it.

And I have the 4S model so it includes the lovely voice assistant Siri...whom I would love more if she acted less like a petulant teenager and more like an assistant.  Because we definitely have a failure to communicate.

Like any good reader, I turned to a book to help me out.  Talking to Siri by Erica Sadun is a short, small book, only about 150 pages and not quite mass-market paperback size, and it is very helpful.  I learned how to phrase questions using Wolfram Alpha-style queries.  I learned how to set places like "home" so I could tell Siri to get me directions to home.  I got the hang of having Siri make appointments for me.

And I learned a few fun things.  For instance, Siri is an "it" not a "she" because different markets have a different voice - the US has a female voice but the UK has male, apparently.  And you can make Siri give you funny answers.

Just tell it you need to dump a body or say "Beam me up, Scotty."  The answers are all deadpan, of course.

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