iPhone: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition

Chapter 4. Speech Recognition—and Siri

The iPhone may have put a camera, a GPS unit, an iPod, and a TV in our pockets. But no matter how much you love the thing, one fact is unassailable: The onscreen keyboard is a drag.

On its Android phones, Google addressed the problem using the screamingly obvious solution: speech recognition. A tiny microphone button next to the space bar, right there on the onscreen keyboard, lets you speak instead of type—anywhere you can type. You don’t get perfect accuracy most of the time, but it’s a heck of a lot faster and less fussy than typing with one finger on glass.

But Apple held out. Steve Jobs, a famous perfectionist, disliked features that only sort of worked, and speech recognition was one of them.

In the end, though, Apple played catch-up the way Apple likes to play: by leapfrogging its rivals.

On the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, you can dial by voice and control music playback by voice.

But on the iPhone 4S, you can go much, much further. First, you can now dictate anywhere you can type, exactly as on Android.

Second, the iPhone 4S offers Siri, a voice-controlled personal minion.

Siri is, to be blunt, amazing. You can say, “Wake me up at 7:45,” or “What’s Chris’s work number?” or “How do I get to the airport?” or “What’s the weather going to be like in San Francisco this weekend?”

You can say, “Any good Italian restaurants around here?” Or “Make a note to rent Titanic this weekend.” Or “How many days until Valentine’s Day?” Or “Play some Electric Light ...