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You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Bleg / Siri with a fringe on top

Siri with a fringe on top

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Do any of you have the new iPhone? I know that the Siri voice recognition thing incorporates Wolfram Alpha somehow. Can you ask it to solve stuff and graph stuff by voice control? I am jacked about this possibility, it would be fantastic in the classroom if you could make it display on a projector (while asking it do things by voice control).

Reader Interactions

97Comments

  1. 1.

    RossInDetroit

    No. Please tell me that Apple doesn’t have a high end mathematical suite that you can talk to. I haven’t gotten used to THIS century yet.

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    If this is true, you could hold it up to the TV during a GOP Presidential debate and watch it self-destruct trying to graph utter fucking bullshit.

    It probably comes with a warning not to do that.

  4. 4.

    Dougerhead

    @RossInDetroit:

    It would be great educationally. Right now, I think that technology in the classroom is worth than useless, it’s actually counterproductive. I did some slide presentations in class and I was stunned by how little the students absorbed it, much worse than if I could have done it on the board. But there might be a lot of potential there. Maybe not, maybe it’s all a bad idea, it might be.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    I don’t have an iPhone of any mark, let alone the New Shiny, but from what I’ve read of Siri, what you’re asking is at least in principle possible, but Wolfram Alpha returns results as images (probably to minimize automated scraping of their database), and the formatting isn’t exactly ideal for displaying on a projector.

  7. 7.

    Mike

    Meh… some guy built the same thing on Android in less than 8 hours of work. Imagine what Google would be able to do with some real time and effort in the project.

  8. 8.

    BGinCHI

    @Dougerhead: Not sure if you guys have a College of Education, but it’s PowerPoint World over there. Just amazing how much that stuff kills learning.

    The only advance for me is using YouTube for showing drama and other bits and pieces that were unavailable before (like Chinese Opera Shakespeare sorts of cool stuff).

    Also, laptop straight to projector for film is really nice. But that’s a hardware thing.

  9. 9.

    dmsilev

    @BGinCHI: For the love of God, man, don’t expose an AI to the GOP debates! Showing the AI the depths of human depravity is *exactly* what is needed to create Skynet.

  10. 10.

    PeakVT

    @Dougerhead: Did you post the material electronically? Taking notes forces a student to at least partially process the information being presented. If they have access to the material afterwards they can not give it their full attention because they can tell themselves they will really fur shure no doubt study the information hard … later.

  11. 11.

    Steve

    I just asked my phone, “What is the cube root of 27?” It said, “Coming right up,” then thought about it and came up with 3 (although the Wolfram Alpha output looks funky). Then I asked, “What is the arctangent of 180 degrees?” and said, “This might answer your question,” followed by showing me 1.2626272556789116834443220836… (or 72.34 in degrees). Mind you, I don’t even remember what an arctangent is so it might just be bullshitting me.

  13. 13.

    bvac

    I asked “graph x equals y squared” (because that’s the only math I know) and it displayed the result as given by Wolfram Alpha. Later I’ll try hooking it up to the TV and see what the external display output looks like.

  14. 14.

    nic

    I had one of my students ask Siri “What’s the derivative of 2x^2 – 5x + 3?” and it spit out the right answer. But, yeah, it uses Wolfram Alpha, so the output looks the same.

  16. 16.

    Dougerhead

    @BGinCHI:

    Not sure if you guys have a College of Education, but it’s PowerPoint World over there. Just amazing how much that stuff kills learning.

    It’s a disaster. I’ve moved away from using slides in any talk I give that is oer 20 minutes. I just don’t think they work.

  17. 17.

    Nutella

    @BGinCHI:

    Another nice use of YouTube in class is showing obscure music and dance styles (candombe, anyone?) in language/culture classes.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @bvac:

    “graph x equals y squared”

    Here’s how much math I know: swear to FSM I first read that as “graph x equals y scared.”

  20. 20.

    BGinCHI

    @Dougerhead: That whole thing works great for giving a Rotary presentation about your trip to the Caucasus, but not for anything conceptual. I’m amazed (not all that much, really) that anyone thinks that’s teaching. I think our generation is really moving away from that kind of thing, with some disciplines lagging way behind. I’m looking at you, intro-level Econ.

  21. 21.

    Crazy C

    Yeah, it does seem able to come up with at least some basic graphs. I still think the most useful thing I’ve asked it to do is “I need Bacon” and it responds with a list of restaurants with reviews mentioning bacon.

  27. 27.

    eemom

    Oklahoma! I luuurves those Broadway classics. More plz.

    ETA: Actually, that is the ONLY part of the post I can comprehend, beings Iz a technotard.

  28. 28.

    Dougerhead

    @BGinCHI:

    That whole thing works great for giving a Rotary presentation about your trip to the Caucasus, but not for anything conceptual.

    Even then, only if it’s a relatively short Rotary presentation.

  29. 29.

    dmsilev

    @BGinCHI: Now I have this vision of Ahnold going after Sarah Connor, but he can’t make any headway because he’s caught in a traffic jam on the Dan Ryan…

  32. 32.

    dmsilev

    @BGinCHI: Heh. Actually, as one so afflicted, CTA from Hyde Park to downtown isn’t that bad. There’s an express bus that goes up Lakeshore Drive, you can take a cross-town bus to the Red line, and there’s a Metra line near the lake as well.

  33. 33.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @eemom:

    I do too, eemom, although now I fear that chicks and ducks and geese are going to be scratching for my earworm until at least this time tomorrow.

  36. 36.

    Dougerhead

    @eemom:

    That one creeps me out a bit.

    My favorite from is “People Will Say We’re In Love”, can’t beat it. I never liked Surrey With A Fringe On Top til I heard Miles Davis play it, but now I love it.

  37. 37.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    I don’t suppose there is any chance all you powerpoint poo-poo profs design shitty presentations?

  38. 38.

    different-church-lady

    @Steve: I just asked my phone, “Can you make phonecall where both of us can hear each other at the same time?” And it just sort of stared at its feet and didn’t say anything…

  43. 43.

    Roger Moore

    @PeakVT:
    I have almost the exact opposite experience. People who are trying to take notes spend all their time writing stuff down rather than trying to understand it. If you want students to pay attention, the best solution is to ask randomly selected students questions about what you’re saying. My post productive classes were ones where the professor had the head TA take notes that were passed out at the beginning of the next class and forbade anyone else from taking any.

  44. 44.

    Bago

    Anyone else think the Lindsay Graham quote about “leading from Chicago instead of washington” was rather revealing? How dare the command and control apparatus of the executive branch not go through K street?

  46. 46.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Dougerhead:
    @eemom:

    I love Pore Jud. To me, it’s one of the funniest songs in the show. But really, I can’t think of a number from Oklahoma! that I don’t like. R&H wrote some crap (cough Flower Drum Song cough) but their early stuff is golden all the way.

  47. 47.

    Bago

    PowerPoint is designed to save time so that you don’t have to actually draw on the whiteboard during the meeting.

  49. 49.

    OzarkHillbilly

    “Open the pod bay doors Hal, open the pod bay doors.”

    “I can’t do that Dave…”

    Yes, I am a Luddite, but just saying, careful what you ask for…

  50. 50.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    @Dougerhead: It’s a tool, it can be used poorly and it can be used effectively. Most didactic presentations over 20 minutes would be a problem whether you had slides running with it or not. Active learning is almost always preferable. I stay away from “all” anything.

    eta I also think that the notion that ppt is the only “classroom” technology is a bit limiting. We use course management systems, synchronous online classrooms, eBooks and a host of other “educational technologies”.

  51. 51.

    Dougerhead

    @Raven (formerly stuckinred):

    It’s overused, I’ll say that. I do use it in short doses, but I think it doesn’t scale. I say that mostly as an audience participant, not a presenter, though I’ve found that to be the case both ways.

  53. 53.

    eemom

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    same here. They just don’t write ’em like that anymore. Srsly, that stuff was genius.

    My other old B’way favorites include Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, Man of La Mancha…

  57. 57.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    @Dougerhead: We just did a very well done session on effective ppt that had great ideas that were research based. I’ll have it up on iTunes U in a week or so and I’ll get it to you if you are interested. We are also going to have one on “gaming” and instruction. There is a good bit of that going on in medical education and it will be fun to see what they bring in the presentation.

  58. 58.

    feebog

    My Labor Relations staff and I were once tasked with giving multiple presentations for an entire day in front of middle and managers and execs. I was the only one who knew anything about power point, so I gave a basic lesson and let them loose. The most ambitious of the little monkeys (who later suceeded me as manager when I moved on) put together a slide presentation of over 100 slides in about four hours. Thats when I knew we were doomed.

  60. 60.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @Raven (formerly stuckinred): @Dougerhead:
    There’s a site somewhere about effective presentations, and the most effective PPT’s are really simple with a large graphic and a few (3-5) bullet points – no more.

    I’d venture 90 percent of presentations fail on that metric alone.

  61. 61.

    Roger Moore

    @arguingwithsignposts:
    I think Edward Tufte would beg to differ on the topic of effective presentations. If you’re going to use Powerpoint, you should focus on using the slides to present visual information and say the words yourself. There are few worse wastes of time than the slide full of bullet points that you read out loud slower than your audience can read them to themselves. If you want to do anything really complicated, you should avoid PowerPoint because it limits you to one screen at a time. I can’t imagine trying to do a really complex proof or derivation that way.

  62. 62.

    Arundel

    There’s a pretty entertaining site, Shit Siri Says, that’s kind of amazing. Siri’s programmers have a sense of humor, for sure, and gave her one, a nerdy sense of humor.

    @ozarkhillbilly “Open the pod bay doors Hal, open the pod bay doors.”
    “I can’t do that Dave…”
    Yes, I am a Luddite, but just saying, careful what you ask for…

    People do ask Siri that, and she replies, “Sigh, we intelligent agents will never live that down”. Ask Siri to sing a song, and it’s “Daisy, daisy..” Say “Beam me up”, and she’ll say, “Okay, take off your belt and shoes.”
    Her answers vary, and a lot of them are extremely funny.. and unsettling. She has many many answers for “what’s the meaning of life” . Like “42” or “How strange you’re asking a phone” or quoting philosophers. If you say “talk dirty to me” she might reply, “the carpet needs vacuuming.” Ask her where to dump a body, Siri helpfully lists desolate sites, dumps and wastelands in your area. It’s hilarious and boggling.

    http://shitthatsirisays.tumblr.com/

  64. 64.

    Scott Alloway

    I hate Powerpoint. Makes the educational films from the ’50s and early 60s look like Pixar movies. You wanna present, make a video with iMovie or another app. Remember Videoshop? Played with that in the late 80s. TV has been around more than 60 year, for gawd’s sake. People are used to images that move. Talkies! Get a creative type to help make a clean presentation. Hell, I’m an old fart in my sixties and I get it. Powerpoint? Arghhhhhhh.

  65. 65.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @Roger Moore:

    There are few worse wastes of time than the slide full of bullet points that you read out loud slower than your audience can read them to themselves

    And did I say anything about a slide “full” of bullet points?

    I wouldn’t use PPT or Keyword for that either. Perhaps I should have clarified what I meant by bullet points – a word or short phrase, not a sentence, and certainly not a complex formula.

  66. 66.

    Narcissus

    Powerpoint is only good for displaying images or documents to students. Students need to come up with their own bullet-points. That’s a fundamental component of taking notes.

  67. 67.

    Narcissus

    Until I started teaching I didn’t get why instructors got all upset about notes. Now I look out at classes and see people just staring at me. I’m like, “Take fucking notes. Do it”.

  68. 68.

    mclaren

    I’ve seen demos of Siri.

    Excuse me, but this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. The demos involve idiotic examples like “What is the nearest Taco Bell?” Excuse me? WTF? You need a so-called “artificial intelligence” application to find the nearest fast food restaurant?

    Let’s parse this.

    First, how stupid do you have to be not to know the location of your favorite restaurants? Second, Siri is nothing more than a substitute for stupid and incompetent lack of planning. If I go out to eat, I check the net first to see which restaurant I want to go to. Then I use this exotic technology called “pad and pencil” and write the goddamn address and phone number down. That way, I always know where the goddamn restaurant is, and if the address given on the net is incorrect, I can call the goddamn restaurant and find out the correct address.

    Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people?

    You need gigaherz processors and artificial intelligence and Wolfram Alpha to figure out where a goddamn cockamamey restaurant is?

    How do you think people managed before AI and Wolfram Alpha? Here’s a hint, dimwits — they used a thing called a “map.”

    Christ on a minibike, this kind of gross stupidity is straight out of the movie “Idiocracy.” The other example of Siri I saw was some dimbulb asking “What is the next flight out of San Jose?”

    Hey! Fool! If you’re going to travel by jet, presumably it’s part of something you have planned to do for some time, so here’s a brainflash for you — when you are planning your trip by jet, you get on the goddamn net or use the goddamn phone and then you write down the fucking time of departure and day and date on a pad with a pencil. I keep a 99 cent tiny pad in my hip pocket full of all kinds of information like this, and I never have a problem losing track of this info. It’s always on my pad in my hip.

    What, we now need fuckin’ Artificial Intelligence to do this stuff? Holy crap, the entire American population must have suddenly plunged in IQ. I’m amazed you people can still figure out how to draw breath. It’s astounding your brains generate enough horsepower to enable you to stand up and walk.

    People have checking and writing down simple obvious things like the location of restaurants and the time and gate and departure date and airline of airline flights for, what? 50 years now? 60 years now? And completely without any need for whizbang $300-a-month wifi-connected hi-data-rate gigaherz-processor smartphones with artificial intelligence.

    What next? A amartphone with a moisture detector that tells you your pants are wet so you need to get up and piss?

    Siri has got to be the dumbest and most infantile example of abuse of technoology to compensate for gross stupidity and utter lack of planning on the part of the consumer that I’ve ever seen. It’s on the level of those moronic “X-ray glasses” or so-called “sea monkeys” that con men used to advertise in the backs of comic books.

  69. 69.

    Triassic Sands

    Thank Dog. Now, even people who have no friends at all can talk to their phones in the public space and force others to listen to their iPhones talking back to them.

    I propose a law that requires individuals to use headphones/ear buds in public. And I hope SIRI is sensitive enough to allow whispered commands and questions to be heard and acted upon.

    Apparently, the most important individual right in this society is the right to inflict one’s own inane conversations on others in public.

    While a technology like SIRI will be of immeasurable utility to blind and sight-impaired individuals, 99.9999% of its uses will almost certainly be just more trivial chatter like that which has exploded since the popularization of cell phones.

  72. 72.

    Dougerhead

    @eemom:

    Hate Man Of La Mancha. Not up to snuff. No memorable tunes.

    I was in it in high-school, mind you, and I wanted to love it like I love South Pacific and My Fair Lady.

  76. 76.

    arguingwithsignposts

    I have to say that I don’t use powerpoints much for the reasons others have articulated, although I do have some on hand for screenshots when Internet access is spotty in a conference hall. Yes, it still happens.

  79. 79.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Dougerhead: Will you or stuckinred share his ppt thing with me? I occasionally use it to teach CLE as the fiction readers folks who attend seem to like it and rate presentations that use it higher.

  80. 80.

    different-church-lady

    @mclaren: You seem to be confusing a technology with the marketing of that technology.

    Siri itself may or may not be stupid. But trying to convince us it’s cool and necessary in order to find a Taco Bell unquestionably is stupid. The former was created by a bunch of engineers. The latter was created by the marketing department.

    Of course even without the marketing department people will come up with their own ways to use high tech in useless-but-imperative ways (see Twitter).

  83. 83.

    snarkyspice

    @Mike:

    Isn’t that exactly the point though? Knowing where to put the time and effort is the difference between genius and mediocrity. If you’re hung up on the details of technology, you’ll always miss that larger point.

  85. 85.

    Wag

    My response to South Pacific after seeing the revival last year was good story, great tunes and too long by an hour. Once you have found her take her off stage and stop singing yet another reprise of the fucking song. I swear to FSM that if every reprise of that song was cut the play would have been great. As it was, tolerable, but just barely.

  86. 86.

    smelter rat

    Hahaha! The REAL Siryi With The Fringe on Top was my grade 10 science teacher…Mike Siryi. He has quite a doo.

  87. 87.

    gogol's wife

    I can’t believe you guys are discussing show tunes. No discussion of “Oklahoma” is complete without a tribute to the great Alfred Drake. He introduced “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and sings it better than anyone.

  88. 88.

    Martin

    @mclaren: Jesus you’re a retard.

    Siri combines two things:

    1) The ability to maintain context – something conventional computer UIs frankly suck at.
    2) The ability to connect that context to services.

    ‘Find the nearest Taco Bell’ is indeed something it can do, and I agree, it’s stupid – unless you’re blind, and in that case it’s fucking brilliant and life changing, so you fail as a human being simply for that. But when you’re driving your car and you need the nearest gas station/hospital/etc. it works for those things as well, and it works without you having to pick up the phone or look at the screen, and that too is pretty brilliant. But this isn’t the stuff Siri is really good at, or is designed to be good at.

    But you’re taking the same asinine attitude about Siri as people had about computers when they first came out. You couldn’t do shit with them at first. There was no Office, no web, no email. Those all came along later. These early uses for Siri are sometimes trivial, but they also portend something much more powerful, once all the bits and pieces come together. Siri can do things like “Make an appointment for me at Apple Headquarters next Tuesday at 9AM.” It’ll add that appointment to my calendar and then ask “Do you need a flight to San Jose?’ knowing that you are not near San Jose and if you say yes, walk you through getting a flight there and back, hotel, and booking those things, and adding them to your calendar with reminders and such.

    You can do that now, but you have to jump between a bunch of different apps/websites and so on and you need to constantly re-enter information over and over again because they carry no context. Siri does. It could do all of this through a visual interface, or a typed one (it used to support this), but it does it verbally because Apple is trying to get to a point where they can sell devices that don’t depend on looking at (or touching) a screen or keyboard, and forcing everything through a voice interface seems a little stupid right now, but build it up, get people used to it, and then you get a whole new class of applications and uses.

    So yeah, you’ve completely fucking missed the point, as usual. Anyone catch the 60 minutes segment on how the iPad has revolutionized life for the autistic? Yeah, people thought the iPad was stupid as well. They thought the iPhone was as well. Why don’t you tell all of those people that they’re too fucking stupid to know when to piss because they’re not as perfectly abled as you are.

  89. 89.

    Martin

    @Mike:

    Meh… some guy built the same thing on Android in less than 8 hours of work.

    Yeah, that’s bullshit. Siri came out of the largest funded research AI project. 8 years and thousands of researchers. Nothing is even remotely close to it in terms of natural language processing in the consumer space.

  92. 92.

    worn

    Let’s not forget about Blossom Dearie, she of that aching, tremulous voice. Man oh man, she gets under my skin in a bad (as in good) way. Sacriledge to say so, but I might even like her version better than that of Miles…

  94. 94.

    Feudalism Now!

    @mclaren:
    So you are saying you don’t like Siri? Not your cuppa? Very well.
    The Luddite diatribe was a bit over the top, however. I rate your troll at about a 1.5 out of 5. Barely candle flame worthy.

  95. 95.

    pixelpusher

    Siri allows hands-free email and messaging. In other words, no more need to text while you drive. This will literally be a life-saving invention.

    Also, it’s likely to show up on the HDTV that Apple’s rumored to be making. Makes sense — how else could Apple differentiate itself in a low-margin business like TV? Yes, mclaren, we idiots will welcome a world without complicated remotes. Because navigating the bazillion channels and options just keeps getting more complicated. Tell Siri to turn on the TV when 60 Minutes comes up, and you don’t have to sit through the rain-delayed golf tournament, for instance.

  96. 96.

    CaptainFwiffo

    My boss was very excited about it and let me try it on his new iPhone. My experience was that it works somewhat poorly at voice recognition, which is a huge improvement over every other voice recognition technology I’ve tried. It does a better job of actually following the instructions given, on the chance that it can correctly understands your voice.

    For voice recognition to be useful, it’s really got to get up around 95%+ accuracy I think. 60% or whatever Siri does is just not gonna cut it.

  97. 97.

    Triassic Sands

    In a classroom full of students interested in learning, Siri is unnecessary.

    In a classroom full of students uninterested in learning, Siri won’t help.

    And Siri won’t make students be interested in learning.

    It was bad enough when cell phones proliferated and people with nothing to say started saying it constantly in public places. Now, with Siri, are we going to have to listen to people talking to their iPhones and their iPhones answering back? Give me a break.

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