I'm writing this on January 5th, so I have the benefit of using Siri throughout the month of December, and through the holidays.
In my experience, Siri has improved in a significant way. I first noticed it about a week before Christmas. Siri answered a question that normally she would have fumbled. Maybe it happened after the late November posts above, but whatever; she's doing a better job now.
And so is Alexa on my Sonos devices, although I think Alexa started improving back in October. Just yesterday, Alexa even translated a word that I couldn't pronounce but I could and did spell it to her. She listened to my spelling, then she proceeded to pronounce the word, translate it to English, and tell me the meaning of it.
Both Alexa and Siri are super useful to me in my kitchen, ESPECIALLY for finding alternative ingredients, translating grams to ounces (or volume measurements such as teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups), deciphering liquid measurements, and more.
I'm not engineering protoplasm in my kitchen, so those estimates I get (mostly from Alexa, with Siri as her backup) have served me well. Hey, as long as the dough rises, the chicken comes out of the oven without any surviving salmonella (I've heard it said that 90% of store-bought chicken has SOME salmonella on it, so we need to nearly burn it under the broiler or over the grill), and the tomahawk ribeye develops a proper bark, I'll be happy.
When writing, Alexa seems to be a bit less fussy when I ask her for the correct spelling or where something is in the world. You know, like a "puffin". I don't need writing tools, but spell-check is critical to me. I also make fairly heavy use of translation, mostly from Spanish to English, either word or phrase.
I think we are living in a truly amazing time, and I think it's important to know about and understand the tools around us. When I was in high school, we were usually not allowed to bring calculators to a test, but that all changed when I got to college. In college, I had one teacher who told us we could roll in any tools we needed to take the test.
The textbook, a calculator, a dictionary, thesaurus, or computer; anything was game. College didn't worry about humanity developing a "codependency" on tools. This was college and we would be expected now to know how to USE the tools at our disposal. No employer was ever going to make us complete a project without having a calculator or dictionary at our side; if that's what we needed to do the work.
Well, the PC computers we had back then did not have windows yet, and they were "portable", if you could get over the idea of calling them "luggables", lol. But they were allowed!
It's well-dated by now, but man oh man, I loved the concept of "Jarvis" in the first Iron Man movie. "That's Jarvis; he runs the house." Down in the shop, Jarvis was reading back pressure stats on Tony's car's engine cylinders! "I want that!" was my response. So cool. I want Jarvis to tell me that the steak is done but the carrots and potatoes in the same pan still need another 10 minutes under the broiler.
I can't wait to see what comes about in the next decade! I look forward to having the "command center" in every room. I just wish I could give it my own choice of voice and personality, like Jarvis or "Friday".
I don't want my Apple Watch to merely annoy me with pings and dings whenever one of my security cameras sees somebody walk up to my front door. I want Jarvis to tell me that my friend Tina is approaching, and oh by the way, shall we open the front door for her? Or that a "possible sales person", identified by the logo-golf-shirt he's wearing, is walking up to my door, so maybe we should verbally tell him "No Soliciting please" before he can even ring the bell.
There is so much more that we can be doing; that we can be thinking about for AI's place in the world. And we SHOULD be thinking about it. And we SHOULD be enthusiastic about it.
I'm willing to spend time training my AI, not only to make it work better for me, but also to give it proper boundaries. Open the door for Tina, yes. But only if I've had a chance to put on pants!
