Missing Siri features

[evandy]

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Does anyone else miss the features that Apple took out of the original Siri? I don't know about anyone else but I used flight status and restaurant reservations pretty frequently and I'm bummed that they're not there. Let's hope that when Siri comes out of beta third-party integration or some of these missing features will come back.

Anyone else have anything they'd like to see?

 

[gnagy]

Anyone else have anything they'd like to see?

I would like it if Siri didn't require an Internet for simple tasks such as calling my wife. I can understand needing network access to find me restaurants, but the old voice control on the iPhone 4 was able to call people just fine without the Internet.

Yes, I know you can turn Siri off and go back to the old school voice control, but I do want the new features as well. i just wish Siri wasn't completely useless when I don't get data service.

 

[marksman]

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Does anyone else miss the features that Apple took out of the original Siri? I don't know about anyone else but I used flight status and restaurant reservations pretty frequently and I'm bummed that they're not there. Let's hope that when Siri comes out of beta third-party integration or some of these missing features will come back.

Anyone else have anything they'd like to see?

Most of those required integration with third party websites. I suspect the long term plan are 3rd party hooks to allow all that and more.

They left out the functionality as it kept them from having to pick favorites or change things when the developer Apis open up. I suspect a lot of that and more will be available eventually.

I know Gruber thinks it would be hard for them to determine what app does what but I suspect they will have specific command sets for various activities apps can register for and then you can name a default app or also name one.

Say you have a Travelocity app as your default for booking flights you would say "find me a flight from Orlando to Dan Jose on October 28th". This would fire up the Travelocity app and pass the information. You could also say "check Expedia for a flight from Orlando to Dan Jose " and it would do the same thing for Expedia. It is just a matter of time. There are some issues and complications but I suspect they will have it expanded in due time

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Anyone else have anything they'd like to see?

I would like it if Siri didn't require an Internet for simple tasks such as calling my wife. I can understand needing network access to find me restaurants, but the old voice control on the iPhone 4 was able to call people just fine without the Internet.

Yes, I know you can turn Siri off and go back to the old school voice control, but I do want the new features as well. i just wish Siri wasn't completely useless when I don't get data service.

The problem with that is you would have to process every Siri command through voice control first before sending it to Siri. This would make every single Siri transaction take more time. It is not like the phone could magically know what is a voice command. Siri is the actual parsing of what is said.

This is a lot more involved then I think people understand. The reason voice control can process stuff on the phone is because that is all it does. Plus such an interface would actually remove some of the flexibility of Siri as anything thought to be a basic voice command could not be used for anything else.

I think people are better off trying to get a data connection where they cant now then hoping the foundation of Siri changes. Until a good part of Siri is processed on device it will not likely change and that will be many years from now

 

[gnagy]

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The problem with that is you would have to process every Siri command through voice control first before sending it to Siri. This would make every single Siri transaction take more time. It is not like the phone could magically know what is a voice command. Siri is the actual parsing of what is said.

This is a lot more involved then I think people understand. The reason voice control can process stuff on the phone is because that is all it does. Plus such an interface would actually remove some of the flexibility of Siri as anything thought to be a basic voice command could not be used for anything else.

I think people are better off trying to get a data connection where they cant now then hoping the foundation of Siri changes. Until a good part of Siri is processed on device it will not likely change and that will be many years from now

I believe Siri does the speech to text conversion locally on the device. E-mail dictation doesn't require network access, so that's how I know it does that part on the phone. It doesn't send a wav file to the server, it just sends the translated text.

They could put a simple if statement in. If the text is "call <some_name>", handle the command locally. If it's not, do whatever Siri is doing now.

You might be correct, but I think this really aught to be doable.


EDIT: Actually I just did another test. I put the phone in 'airplane' mode, and the e-mail dictation stopped working. So maybe the speech-to-text engine does require network access also. But dictation seems to work much more reliably/faster than Siri, so I'm not entirely convinced. Anyway, you might be 100% right, and it might just be too difficult to implement.

 

[solarguy17]

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Anyone else have anything they'd like to see?

I would like it if Siri didn't require an Internet for simple tasks such as calling my wife. I can understand needing network access to find me restaurants, but the old voice control on the iPhone 4 was able to call people just fine without the Internet.

Yes, I know you can turn Siri off and go back to the old school voice control, but I do want the new features as well. i just wish Siri wasn't completely useless when I don't get data service.

If you have no network connection, how do you call you wife?

 

[gnagy]

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If you have no network connection, how do you call you wife?

Sometimes, the Internet doesn't work on the phone, but it's perfectly capable of making phone calls.

 

[steveza]

If you have no network connection, how do you call you wife?

I guess he means data connection