Apple gives insight into Siri on iPhone 4S

Apple knowingly injected the Siri engine with more attitude when it began refining it for the iPhone 4S, an engineer for the project gave out on Saturday. While Siri's co-founder and former worker Norman Winarsky's team gave it a "light attitude," the WSJ heard from its insider that the company wanted "edge," even if the core of the engine was "friendly and humble." That includes both turning down offers of marriage, answering why it's awesome, and responding to requests for hiding a body or having sex with clearly self-aware location-based results.

The goal was to ask "how would we want a person to respond?" according to the source.

Many geek references also exist that betray the Apple engineers' roots, including to HAL 9000 singing "Daisy" in 2001, the early computer AI routine Eliza, requests to "beam me up" as in Star Trek, and the answer to the meaning of life from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Some of the pop culture answers, such as the weight of an unladen swallow or the number of licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, come from Wolfram Alpha's engine.

The code also uses simple touches, such as referring to people by their nicknames.

Siri may represent a return to the sense of humor that sometimes permeated Apple's lineup early on but which had drifted away in recent years. Early Mac software often had repeated inside references such as Clarus the dogcow or the "sosumi" sound's dig at Apple Records. Apple has often argued about designing for a human experience, something which the engineer said extended to Siri itself. "We thought of it almost as a person on the phone," he said.

By Electronista Staff