Siri: Personal Assistant of The Generation
In 2010, a revolutionary application called Siri was released for iOS. Months later it was bought and acquired by Apple Inc., it was shortly removed as an application and integrated into the iPhone 4S as an intelligent personal assistant. Since then, Siri has become an important part of Apple's operating systems and has revolutionized the manner in which users interact with information, phones, and computers (Newnham). This individual platform, like other digital mediums, exemplifies Murray's four affordances that describe its functional properties- those that allow particular uses of the device (Murray). These affordances are procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial.
Siri was designed to be procedural, meaning that it is composed of executable rules, which allows users to specify limited, executable instructions that create a new representational action (Murray). The iPhone user can speak a command to Siri. For example, "Hey Siri, set read me my the last email I received." Siri processes that user's language (instruction) and produces a particular action, in this case, Siri reads the email. A user is able to talk to Siri and get it to set alarms, create reminders, send emails, search for restaurants, and much more. Siri and the user must interact in order produce a computerized action, demonstrating Siri's participatory affordance. According to Murray, a digital medium can be participatory in allowing an interactor to manipulate, contribute to, and have an effect upon digital content and computer processing (Murray). Siri was designed to script the behavior of the computer and the behavior of the user, creating a level of interactivity between user and device, a by product of the participation and procedurality affordances (Murray).
Murray believes a digital medium can be encyclopedic in three ways. First, through its capacity and the vast number of bits of information it contains. Second, through its extensive range of computational media format. Lastly, through its ability to represent any process through logical symbolic representation (Murray). Siri demonstrates this encyclopedic functionality through its ability to process a user's spoken request and navigate through both its internal and external data bases in order to produce the correct piece of information, whether it be through an action, or image/text format. Siri's navigation feature relates to its spatial affordance where its digital environment is represented through means of traditional media (Murray). Users are able to distinguish Siri's spatial aspects through Siri's responses whether it be through the use of images, text, sounds, maps, etc. According to Murray, this navigable space is created by distinguishing one place from another and creating consistent interaction patterns that support movement between spaces. (Murray). The video below, is a commercial demonstrating the way in which Siri's spatial features are represented. This 2011 Siri commercial aims to emphasize the everyday life interaction between Siri and the user. Over the years, technological advances have been made and Siri has developed more astonishing features. It is left to our imagination to see what the next generation of iPhones have in store for Siri.
Before Siri, speech systems were either extremely directed (“Please say the name of a city and state, now”), or were Voice Search: the words you said were pasted into a mobile search engine and blue links to web pages were returned, but the system had no real comprehension of the words or how to return a concrete answer (Bosker). The original developers of Siri sold Siri to Apple because they cared about the user experience more than any other company, and they believed Siri was about enhancing the user’s experience for getting tasks done. Over the years, Siri has changed users’ expectations of what is possible in interacting with information, phones, and computers. It is now in the hands of more than 100 million users and growing (Newnham).
References
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204389
https://inventingthemedium.com/glossary/
https://medium.com/swlh/the-story-behind-siri-fbeb109938b0 Newnham
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-apple-iphone_n_2499165.html