Reviews of Siri have been fairly inconsistant over the last few months. Some folks are in love with the feature, and others can’t stand it. But if there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that it has massive potential.
Sure, Apple’s digital assistant is currently extremely limited — it’s still in beta. Remember, Siri is crowd-sourced. It is constantly learning. So it wouldn’t surprise us if Apple added functionality to Siri in the not-so-distant future.
With Christmas just a few days away, we figured it would be only fitting to create a wish list of 5 things we’d like to see Apple add to Siri next year…
There’s just two things you must know before we get started. One, these are feasible requests — things we believe are possible. That’s why you won’t see things like “make me a sandwich” on this list. And two, these are in no particular order.
1. Read Email – Siri can read text messages with no problem, so we found it odd that Apple omitted the ability to read emails. The assistant can search through your inbox and locate emails based on topics, but it can’t read them? Come on.
2. Launch Applications – This one is pretty self explanatory. From the lock screen, it can take 2-6 taps to launch a particular application depending on what screen it’s on and whether or not it’s in a folder. At the minimum, Siri should be able to launch native apps.
3. Toggle Settings – Since Apple insists on pulling all of the setting-shortcut apps out of the App Store, it’d be nice if it would give us a proper solution. We’d like to see the company add the ability to toggle settings with the digital assistant. Saying “Wi-Fi on,” or “Bluetooth off” would be much easier than digging through the various menus.
4. Third-party App Support – Without a doubt, adding this feature would have the biggest impact. If Apple opened up Siri’s API (even a small portion of it) to third-party developers, apps would finally have native Siri functions. Imagine being able to say, “I’m looking for a 500GB harddrive,” and watching products populate in the Amazon app on your handset.
5. Twitter Integration – We love Twitter. And we find it interesting that Siri doesn’t have the native ability to simply send a tweet. The social networking service is integrated into just about everything else in iOS 5, so why not Siri?
These are just a few of the features we’d like to see Apple add to Siri next year.
What would you like to see?