Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, has been the highlight of the iPhone 4S launch. Not just because it’s very sophisticated and can make stuff easy for you, but because it’s funny. As David Pogue said, it’s entirely possible that a bunch of Hollywood joke writers, camped up in Apple’s North Carolina data center, are coming up with the funny responses Siri has in store for iPhone 4S users.
This Is My Next’s Joshua Topolsky experimented quite a bit with Siri early on when he reviewed the iPhone 4S, and needless to say discovered a number of funny responses.
After the iPhone 4S went on sale to the public, Siri’s humor became widely known with multiple screenshots of Siri’s funny responses doing the rounds on Twitter. It went onto become viral, and even got the Tumblr treatment every meme gets.
WSJ spoke to one of Siri’s co founders about the quirky side of Siri:
“There were many conversations within the team about whether it should be gender neutral” or “should have an ‘attitude,’ ” said Mr. Winarsky, who didn’t go to Apple, and still works at SRI. The result, before the software was bought by Apple, was “occasionally a light attitude,” he said.
Apple also worked on adding some humor into Siri, according to the WSJ article:
When Apple began integrating Siri into the iPhone, the team focused on keeping its personality friendly and humble—but also with an edge, according to a person who worked at Apple on the project. As Apple’s engineers worked on the software, they were often thinking, “How would we want a person to respond?” this person said.
The Siri group, one of the largest software teams at Apple, fine-tuned Siri’s responses in an attempt to forge an emotional tie with its customers.
Embedded below are few of the funniest Siri responses we’ve seen till now:
Tell us which one’s your favorite?
Also, does Siri’s beta tag mean that its (her?) humor is going to get better over time?
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One Response to “Siri has a sense of humor”
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Beta or not, any technology improved greatly in the first few years of its release. The first thing I expect to see is an improvement in intonation. Right now, there is still a bit of the mechanical robot-talk in the speech. I also expect a choice of voices, male or female as in other devices.
I suspect that, in five years, the difference will be so great it is hardly recognizable as the same program.
No, I don’t expect it to sing “Bicycle built for two.”