Questions for Siri
By Jacob Glassner | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Well, after three years of using the original iPhone, I’m now the proud new owner of an iPhone 4S.
The most interesting aspect of this incarnation of the iPhone is the computerized personal assistant named Siri.
You’ve probably seen the TV commercials: You can ask Siri to call a friend, write a text message or remind you to take out the trash when you get home. She talks (I say “she” because Siri has a female voice) and interacts with you. You simply push a button on your phone and ask away.
And you can ask anything; it doesn’t have to be business-related. She’s friendly and knowledgeable, and even a little sassy.
In my non-scientific tests of Siri, she has understood me—Kentucky twang and all—much better than other talk-to-text applications I’ve tried in the past.
“Siri, what do you look like?” I asked.
“In the cloud, no one cares what you look like,” she replied.
For the late adopters out there, iCloud is an online virtual hard drive to store documents, photos, music and other files.
Next I pitched her a curveball, thinking there was no way she would understand me.
“How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” I asked.
“Forty-two cords of wood, to be exact. Everyone knows that,” she said.
“Siri, tell me a joke,” I asked.
“Two iPhones walk into a bar … I forget the rest,” she said.
These questions might have been too easy for her, so I decided to ask some theological questions.
“Who is Jesus?”
She pulled up an encyclopedia entry on my phone screen with facts about Jesus, which read: “Central figure of the Christian religion, seen by most Christians as the Son of God or God incarnate.”
If Siri doesn’t have a response, she’ll often suggest a web search to answer your question. That’s what happened when I asked, “How can a man be saved,” and some other theological questions.
I also asked her the first question of the Westminster Catechism: “What is the chief end of man?”
I was hoping she’d say, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever,” but she had no response.
So I rephrased the question, and this time I got a response.
“What is the meaning of life?” I asked.
“I find it odd that you would ask this of an inanimate object,” she said.
I wasn’t satisfied with that reply. Siri often gives different answers to the same question if you ask her more than once, so I asked again.
“What is the meaning of life?”
“I can’t answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens.”
Funny, Siri.
I asked again.
“Life: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity and continual change preceding death,” she replied.
She tricked me and gave me a definition of the word “life.” At this point I was getting a little embarrassed because Siri talks kind of loud and I was hoping my coworkers weren’t hearing me repeatedly asking my phone for philosophical advice. So I shut my door and asked one more time, and this last time she gave me a real
response.
“Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations,” she said.
While her answer may include some good advice, it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. And as it turns out, I Googled her response and it’s a quote from the Monty Python film “The Meaning of Life.”
Next I might just have to explain the Romans Road to Siri.