Watch Me Talk To My iPhone 4S (Siri Demo)

If the iPhone 4S has one standout feature, it is the Siri personal assistant. You ask Siri to do things by speaking to it, and it can call anyone in your contact list, send them a text message or email, set up a meeting, play a song, set up a reminder for yourself, get directions, or just ask a question. It is a conversation starter in more ways than one. Siri is the kind of feature that makes you want to whip out your phone to show a friend or a total stranger.

John Biggs and I covered Siri in yesterday’s Fly or Die episode on the iPhone 4S, but I taped this extra video to go into more depth. It’s just better to see Siri in action that to read about it. Siri isn’t perfect. Sometimes it runs into network issues, picks up background noise, or gets the wrong question because your instinct is to start talking before it is ready. But it is the most impressive voice-computer interface out there right now.

In the demo above, I set up a reminder to pick up some flowers for my wife (a notification later popped up on my phone at the appointed time), dictate a note, find a park nearby on a map, and set up a meeting with Biggs. When you set up a meeting, Siri both sends an email to the other person and puts it on your calendar. I find that particularly impressive because this is a case where talking to Siri takes so much less time than doing those actions myself.