Apple’s Siri personal assistant smarter and faster

Apple last week released a new version of its operating system, including a major upgrade to Siri.

Siri can understand natural language requests on Apple's iOS9 operating system (Beta)

Apple’s Siri personal assistant is an honest broker. Apple last week released a new version of its upcoming iPhone and iPad operating system called iOS9.

It is designed for the public to test and it involves a major upgrade to Siri, which is now better equipped to understand questions couched in natural language.

But ask her if the Sydney Swans won on the weekend, and she says: “Sorry, I don’t know about Australian Football”. At least she’s being honest. If it’s any consolation to AFL fans, she’s not hot with her NRL answers either.

Ask her for baseball results and you get a complete scorecard from the Major League Baseball.

It’s one of the foibles of so-called Beta software. You get futuristic features but it’s often rough and ready, buggy, and not tuned to a local region.

I discovered how inconvenient bugs can be when a Beta is loaded on to your main phone or tablet. When I loaded iOS9 on an iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2, my Feedly news feed and iOS BlackBerry Messenger apps stopped working. So I didn’t receive messages from friends on the weekend. iOS9 seems robust enough. The problem is that many third-party apps are not ready for it.

Siri’s overall improvement is a highlight. There had been complaints about Siri in Australia not having the same ability to understand conversational queries as in the US. One of the complainants was Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of the Wolfram Alpha computational engine that Siri uses. He made that complaint while visiting Australia in 2012.

Siri’s a bit argumentative and sometimes cuts in with an answer before you finish the question. But she’s immensely smarter. When I asked her the distance from Sydney to Melbourne, she replied “about 713km”, which is as the crow flies. That didn’t work so well before.

I asked her to show me last month’s photos, last week’s emails, photos I had taken in Barcelona, where could I find coffee nearby, Chinese restaurants nearby, and to display this week’s messages. When I said: “Show me the way to go home,” Siri obliged with a map and told me about traffic ­delays.

And she’s great with maths and finance. When I said “convert 2160 Australian dollars to US dollars,” she obliged immediately with $US1606.78. And when I asked: “multiple 289 by 23 and the square root of 41”, she replied instantly with 26,214.4.

Improvements in Siri and rival systems such as Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s voice engine suggests there will be a day when the public generally embraces voice interactions with phones, although we’re not at that critical mass stage yet.

iOS9 has other nice features. Some are well overdue. Apple fin­ally has rejigged its onscreen keyboard so that all letters display as capitals when you select upper case, and as lower case when it’s selected. It’s basic, but it’s not been Apple’s way on iOS.

The standard Notes app is more sophisticated. You can now capture maps and photos, draw with your finger, and add photos and attachments.

When you double-tap to swap between apps, your choices of apps show as larger cards and on the iPhone 6 you’ll see a full screen of an app you might switch to.

A couple of important features haven’t made it to the Australian Beta of iOS9 yet. There’s no dedicated News app nor proactive search. Once this search is working, results will be populated automatically based on what you’re doing on the device.

The most spectacular changes are on iPad. If you have an iPad Air 2, you can split the screen and work with two apps either side, as you might with Windows 8.1. If you have an iPad Air, Air 2, Mini 2, or Mini 3, you can view one app while you access another in the right hand column. It isn’t so great as the second app disappears as soon as you access the first again.

You can also minimise a video and keep watching it at the bottom of the screen while accessing another app. So you can watch a video as you write.

It remains to be seen how popular multi-tasking is on a relatively small, tablet-sized device.

A final version of iOS9 is expected in time for the next iPhone launch, probably in September.