The marketing of Siri, Apple’s newest digital assistant, has been furious and relentless of late. The way Apple’s marketing department sells it, Siri is your Genie in a phone, an iPhone 4s, to be exact. They tell you that tasking is now best done via voice control, typing is so yesterday, and Siri has all your answers, well almost. While you are at work, tell Siri (verbally of course) to remind you to pick up milk on the way home, and Siri uses GPS positioning to figure out when you leave work, then reminds you to pick up milk just as you clock out of your 9-to-5. Smart girl!
Sadly, Siri was Steve Job’s last gift to Apple fans. He died just one day after the Siri/iPhone 4s’ introduction and the faithful reacted accordingly. Notwithstanding the fact that iPhone 4s is just a turbo charged version of its predecessor with Siri added, its first day pre-orders still exceeded 1 million units, a whopping 67% increase over its prior record of 600,000 orders set by the iPhone 4 in June of 2010. Siri, it turns out, is a real force to be reckoned with.
To be clear, Siri isn’t a self-sustaining chip or a robot installed on your iPhone. Rather, it is a program that routes your queries to one of Apple’s Siri servers, then one of the servers sends back a response as it sees fit. According to the website siricrazy.com, Siri doesn’t work when Apple’s servers are under heavy load (or when you don’t access to the phone network).
In past years, Time magazine’s editors picked their Person of the Year based on the sheer strength of their influence to the mass, with U.S. Presidents being a sure lock in at least once in their terms. In 2010, Time went with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg for changing the landscape of social media. For 2011, they picked ‘The Protestor’ for changing the world’s political landscape. Given the way Siri is changing how we will communicate with our most essential personal device going forward, it will just be a matter of time before they pick her to be their Person of the Year. Perhaps I should ask Siri to see if she agrees…