[Macworld]

Post your comments for Siri: The missing Mountain Lion feature here

[Lenjc1957]

I also hope that they add more compatible models of Macs to the list when the final product becomes available for download. The list, at present, looks a bit scant. Any Mac capable of running Lion should surely be able to, and enabled to run Mountain Lion, and Apple shouldn't leave any of these Macs behind.

[gofigure]

Siri is not as important on the Mac as would the creation of an AppleID workgroup so groups of people, families, small biz etc can share info without setting up a server. A current AppleID could be promoted to be the head of a workgroup assigning access using appleIDs. Let's get this going Apple. I can search just fine without voice.

[vinnie_A]

iBooks on the Mac would be a great idea too -- it will compete better with the Kindle App. Then you can truly read your books everywhere. A glaring omission by Apple...

[iPlaid]

Don't think this will happen in OS-X for awhile. It needs to happen on the iPad first.

[PJL500]

SIRI is slow - maybe they are working on it. The VR on some Android phones is amazing.... the words just fly on to the screen.

[BillZ]

Adding Siri to Mountain Lion is a good idea. That way there will be at least one feature of interest to me.

[Inkling]

I don't know. I've only got a 3GS, so no Siri for me, but I get the impression that during the busy hours Apple's huge server farm is already overloaded. This would only make that worse.

Besides, my greatest wish for Mountain Lion is that Apple would either eliminate or at least allow us to turn off the stupid changes that were made in Lion, particularly the way they messed up file saving. I used to like Preview. It was a fast, quick way to look at documents. Now every time I close out after looking, I wait 4-5 seconds, while Lion saves a copy of that file off to some obscure hidden file, before asking me if I want to save a copy. "No, you idiot Lion, that's why I chose to close rather than to save." Wasted time. Stupid, unnecessary wasted time courtesy of Apple.

Fixing something that isn't broken is a really dumb UI move. Fixing something that works well and is versatile and quick, to try to make life easier for the stupidest 2% of Mac users is really, really stupid. Let them forget to save a few times. They'll learn. They need to learn anyway.

Alas, at times I fear that all Steve Jobs yelling at people, calling them stupid and s---heads, has warped Apple's corporate culture. The average Apple employee--or at least those in UI--now regard Mac users as stupid or worse. With Lion, they gave us a crippled OS to product us from that alleged stupidity. They need to fix that mistake with Mountain Lion. And if in the process they have no time to add Siri, that's OK.

[Robinthehood]

 PJL500, on 20 February 2012 - 07:30 AM, said:

SIRI is slow - maybe they are working on it. The VR on some Android phones is amazing.... the words just fly on to the screen.

Yes lets hope Apple is working on matching and beating the competition with anything voice related.
They have a lot of irons in the fire but voice commands has a large appeal and wow factor they should not stumble on getting it more precise... spare no expense- do it and get it right!

[ibrewster]

Aside from the possibility of overloading the servers that run Siri (which is a possibility, although perhaps with the power of a desktop more processing could be done locally), I think the microphone situation is more of an issue than you give it credit for. Think about it: Speech recognition works currently, but not terribly well. And that is with only having a limited number of things it has to recognize. It is MUCH easier to figure out what is being said if you only have to get close enough to eliminate the other half dozen possibilities as being too different from what you thought you heard. Siri, however, has to get it 100% right to work properly. Even nuance doesn't do this - especially using the built in mic. With nuance, you can go back and fix what it messes up on, no problem. Imagine how annoying it would be to use Siri if practically every time you said something you had to correct what it heard. It works on the 4S because of those dual mics, combined with the extra processing power to clean up the audio. A desktop machine has the processing power, but not the mics. Using Siri would be a nightmare without special hardware to support it.

[PeterDeep]

 vinnie_A, on 20 February 2012 - 07:21 AM, said:

iBooks on the Mac would be a great idea too -- it will compete better with the Kindle App. Then you can truly read your books everywhere. A glaring omission by Apple...

100% agree.

[kenhare]

Siri is a bit frustrating for users in the UK. Quite a few functions ("where's the nearest pizzeria?") are met with a response like" I can only look for businesses in the United States and when you're using US English. Sorry about that".
Any extension in Siri functionality should first address rolling it out to the rest of us. Mine has been switched off for a while, though being able to dictate into Apps (Messages etc) is very handy.
The other problem is that it requires a connection to the internet. Some of us live in places where this is not a given. I can understand that some of Siri's functionality requires this, but it is frustrating if NONE of it works if there is no internet. Perhaps if implemented in Mountain Lion, there could be some local caching of, say, speech recognition. I might just want to dictate something. To find I can't dictate unless I am connected to the internet is frustrating.

[PeterDeep]

 Inkling, on 20 February 2012 - 07:40 AM, said:

I don't know. I've only got a 3GS, so no Siri for me, but I get the impression that during the busy hours Apple's huge server farm is already overloaded. This would only make that worse.

Besides, my greatest wish for Mountain Lion is that Apple would either eliminate or at least allow us to turn off the stupid changes that were made in Lion, particularly the way they messed up file saving. I used to like Preview. It was a fast, quick way to look at documents. Now every time I close out after looking, I wait 4-5 seconds, while Lion saves a copy of that file off to some obscure hidden file, before asking me if I want to save a copy. "No, you idiot Lion, that's why I chose to close rather than to save." Wasted time. Stupid, unnecessary wasted time courtesy of Apple.

Fixing something that isn't broken is a really dumb UI move. Fixing something that works well and is versatile and quick, to try to make life easier for the stupidest 2% of Mac users is really, really stupid. Let them forget to save a few times. They'll learn. They need to learn anyway.

Alas, at times I fear that all Steve Jobs yelling at people, calling them stupid and s---heads, has warped Apple's corporate culture. The average Apple employee--or at least those in UI--now regard Mac users as stupid or worse. With Lion, they gave us a crippled OS to product us from that alleged stupidity. They need to fix that mistake with Mountain Lion. And if in the process they have no time to add Siri, that's OK.

Speak for yourself. I really like the new way it saves files. Prior to Lion, if you changed an image in Preview and chose to close the window by clicking the red button, it also behaved exactly the same and asked if you wanted to save the file. This is the default behavior for every app that I can can think of, so I don't know what you are complaining about really.

[WesF]

It wouldn't hurt to bring Siri to MacOS X. The speech recognition is really a throw back from Mac OS Classic, System 7.5 comes to mind. It really hasn't changed all that much since then. You can do Siri-ish things with the current stuff using AppleScript and custom speech commands, but AppleScripts support for Regular Expressions (kinda important for natural speech processing) is rather limited at best. I'd think they'd have to revamp the speech API before rolling out Siri. I don't really care about Siri on my Mac, to be honest. But it sure would be nice on my iPad!!