- Let us hope folks learn to conform to Miss Siri's still somewhat limited command structure before they take to the road...
Let's face it, Siri's voice activated commands are not a sweet and simple as portrayed on the ads. I find more often than not it is quicker to do it manually then try to figure out how to coax her to do more than the most mundane tasks!
- Apple announced an expansion of Siri at the opening of its developers' conference on Monday; new devices and apps will work with the voice-command service. One of the more intriguing areas of that expansion was the addition of automakers to Siri's roster of partners. Apple announced that Audi, BMW, Chrysler, General Motors, Honda, Land Rover/Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota would all have "Eyes Free" buttons in their cockpits starting in the next 12 months or so.
It's a fairly impressive list of automakers. Taken all together, they have sold 58.4 percent of all the cars in the United States so far this year.
- Another point: voice commands may not be visually distracting, but they may be cognitively distracting. We may be entering an age where we can send text messages by voice and hear Facebook posts read aloud to us - and that's clearly better than trying to do that on a smartphone, with one hand while the other is on the wheel - but maybe these activities are better left outside the car altogether?
For other related topics, be sure to also see 2012 Distracted Driving news