In Star Trek, the crew of the Starship Enterprise would talk to the ship’s computer. The ship would respond to the commands. In the distant future your voice would handle your communications to the computer.

Well it’s here now.

Siri, the personal assistant on Apple’s Iphone 4S, can handle some of your requests and help you be more productive.It can put appointments on your calendar, send emails and texts, remind you of things that need doing,keep a shopping list,find restaurants and stores,make notes and more. Simply by talking to the assistant that’s part of your phone.

I will be presenting some observations and hopefully some very useful information so you may get some insight on how to use Siri effectively and also information about its limitations.

By the way, the new Ipad does not have Siri, but it has a very usable and accurate speech recognition capability that also aids your productivity.

Stay tuned!

So what can Siri do?

What can it do to aid your productivity?

Here is a link from TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Website) that is an excellent guide to what you can ask of Siri:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to-siri/ 

There are many questions that Siri can answer on this long list.

Here are just a few examples:

“Call my brother at work.”

“set the timer for 55 minutes” (great for avoiding parking tickets at meters.)

“remind me to pick up flowers when I leave here”

“What is a 15% tip on $87.84?”

“What is apple’s stock Price?”

“Call home”

“I’m in the mood for Pizza”

“Wake me up tomorrow at 7am”

Many, many more questions listed in the above posting show the understanding that Siri has with her combination of speech recognition combined with her artificial intelligence.

Siri is Beta and the first iteration of a personal assistant via a smart phone.

Learning to use the assistant well will definitely make you more productive.