The Siri iPhone app wants to make getting dinner reservations or concert tickets as easy going to a concierge: all you have to do is open the app, tell it what you want, and it’ll arrange the rest.
For example, say you’re in New York City for an important business trip, and, after an evening of drinks with your colleagues, you all decide — as one sometimes does — that you want to go to a concert… specifically, by an industrial metal band specializing in sadomasochist leitmotifs.
All you’d do in that case is launch the Siri app and say, “Get me tickets for four to the next Genitorturers concert.” And that’s it. Siri will automatically identify your location through GOPS, then search its partners including OpenTable, MovieTickets, StubHub, CitySearch and TaxiMagic for the show.
Neat stuff, but knowing how finicky voice recognition can still be, using Siri might be less like getting your evening sorted through a concierge than screaming into the hearing horn of a shell-shocked veteran. You can grab it for free through the App Store.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
