Hey Syri

The two words that I speak most often are, “Hey Siri.” The iPhone voice command I speak is most often is “Hey Siri, where are you?” The iPhone lights up and answers, “right here!” I have a black iPhone 6s with a black case; when the lights are dim, sometimes I have trouble locating my iPhone even when it is sitting right on my desk. Sometimes I leave my phone in another room and forget where I left it. It must be quite a ridiculous sight, watching me move from room to room, shouting, “Hey Siri, where are you?”

When you first set up Siri, you train it to recognize your voice. In the early days of this feature, It was less selective and almost any voice could activate it, so you could walk up to someone’s iPhone and say, “Hey Siri, from now on call me Butthead,” and it would.

Phil Schiller made an interesting observation about Siri during an Apple product announcement. He said that when he talked to his team about the Hey Siri feature, they would often trigger their own phones. So they got into the habit of always saying “Hey…Siri” with a long pause, which avoided triggering the command. Sometimes if another person’s voice is similar to yours, it can trigger Siri anyway. Phil has a neutral voice, so I wondered how many iPhones he could trigger in the auditorium full of hundreds of iPhones.

Recently, something happened with Siri that I did not think was possible. I was listening to the NPR News podcast via their app. The announcer said “ToDAY SYRIa..” and suddenly Siri said, “Yes?”  Apparently Siri even listens to the iPhone itself. Now I want to buy advertising on audio podcasts, that in a neutral voice says “Hey Siri, from now on, call me Butthead.”

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© Copyright 2016 Charles Eicher