Siri Makes Its Way To The Mac… Incognito

It was only a matter of time and only another sign of worlds colliding. Or rather, I should say a world taking over the other and you know which one is taking over… the mobile one.

As I was updating my Mac this AM to the new OS X (10.8.2) a slew of new features showed up and 2 caught my eye so far, underscoring the current mobile take over.

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1 — Twitter:

In the same way the official iPhone app allows you to connect your contacts and update them with their Twitter handle and avatar, you can now do the same on your mac. Facebook offers the same functionality on the iPhone but not on the Mac thus far, they’re the newbie at Apple, maybe at the next major iOS update.

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2 — “Siri” aka DS:

Following the update the “system preferences” app opened to have me confirm settings in the “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” section, where by the way my main Twitter account is listed as if just another standard email account — do I hear anyone say “post-social“?

Glancing through the rest of the settings, an new icon shows up, innocently titled “Dictation & Speech” (DS) but not “Siri”, probably some contractual issue with the actual makers of Siri.

At the same time, I so happen to be chatting over Twitter with a new interesting character named @HankBlank and listening to one of his @YouTube videos titled: “Networking Tips for People Who Hate Networking”, a cool pep talk designed to get people who tend to keep their backs to the wall at parties.

Since I don’t necessarily affectionate anything that gets close to IVR and to put DS — “déesse” is French for godess think “deity”, so we’re still in the Siri realm — to the test, I turned on DS while @HankBlank’s video was playing. The results, in the video below, were pretty satisfying with a few glitch, for one it got me to rethink my aversion for IVR systems. I’ll be sure to test it some more who knows, it might help, I often get the comment that I speak too fast (-;

Then again the background music may be a biasing variable.

Have you tried DS? What impressions? Other updates that caught your eye?