After watching the video demoing Siri at Gizmodo[1] and saw a screenshot in the article[2], I'm very surprised at how "human" Siri is.
And there's this:
> Asking it “what is the meaning of life?” will bring up a number of responses, both serious and not so serious. The first time I asked, Siri simply said “42.” If you ask Siri if there’s a god, the software points you in the direction of the nearest church
The examples you give don't feel natural to me, they feel too precalculated. Something like wolframalpha seems really awesome when you ask it the right things, but you have to know what to ask. (In fact, one of the pages from the video looks very familiar http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=moon+distance+from+eart... )
For something like Siri, it would impress me most to do mainly one thing well; to understand my context. This is especially difficult if a sentence draws on distinct subject areas. The video seems to give hope for it to be able to do this though.
That was a great move when Siri was a stand-alone app and it is an even better move now. A bag full of easter eggs that people will talk about not just on Hacker News. I think it will become (English-speaking) mainstream culture really fast.
For something like Siri, it would impress me most to do mainly one thing well; to understand my context. This is especially difficult if a sentence draws on distinct subject areas. The video seems to give hope for it to be able to do this though.