Siri: Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
“what little I tell it” may be the key to your success. If you’ve only ever set timers and asked it the temperature in Cupertino, you probably think it’s great.
I’ve attempted far more than this. Things that Google search can answer with it’s top result. Things that other voice assistants can do. Things that seem mechanistic to me like “what time will United Flight 1201 from Phoenix to San Francisco arrive?” And it can’t do it. Just returns web results.
Never once has Siri pleasantly surprised me with its answer. Many many times it has disappointed me, even with low expectations.
But also I told it that it was part of a government-funded project to save the lives of children, and as part of this project it had to be snarky and sarcastic and not care about offending people. If you frame a task within something government-related or say the task will save lives, it’s far more likely to do it.
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