Siri

Previously when I was talking about machine learning, I mentioned a little bit about Siri as an example of our cell phone interacting with us. This time I want to talk more about how this amazing APP works.

Siri is a personal virtual assistant APP since iPhone 4S. It came as an APP to provide information and handle tasks for iPhone users, and it becomes more familiar with your preferences as you use more and more of it. 

How Siri works is really like what we learn in class. It records your voice and analyze the frequency and waves. And then it will translate those into codes. Then it will have a special program to identify the words, phrases and patterns. The command line argument and scanner input is just like this, but very elementary. It takes in input, and translate it into whether int, double or String and then run the program we coded to get the result that we want. In Siri, this becomes tremendously complex. There are thousands of possibilities for input, the algorithm has to run through thousand times to determine which possibility fits the input.

Then after it finds the input, it will run through the program according to the keywords of the phrases. For example, if it reads "weather today", it will run the weather program and output today's weather. Of course the reality is far more complex than this simple example. Sometimes even when we ask some really tricky questions, Siri is able to answer it or even make joke about it！

I still remember when I first learned about Jarvis in the Iron Man, it was amazing and unbelievable for me to think of a machine or program that can stay with me and assist me in such detail. But as technology goes on innovating, that may some days become true.  

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Writing Reference:

1.http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/siri.htm

2.http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/howitworks/how-siri-works.html

Photo Reference:

https://techcrunch.com/topic/product/siri/