After one week of playing with my new iPhone 4S, Siri has been the most intriguing feature of the phone. While it’s certainly not perfect, yet, as it’s officially in beta, it’s a very important useful tool in mobile phone technology.

I will continue to add tips here as I experience them.

Here are some of the experiences I’ve learned from this week.

What’s Cool:

• If you create a list called ‘groceries’ in your Reminders app, simply hold down the button to talk to Siri and say, “Add cereal to my groceries list.”  Siri will than ask you to confirm it with a screenshot of the request, and you’re happily on your way.

  

• Probably my favorite feature so far is that I can compose text messages while I am in the car. The car is where I remember most of things I should be doing and being able to easily contact people by simply dictating to iMessage is very handy. Simply hold down the button and say, “Send a message to Stephen Buck” and it will ask you “Okay, I can send a message to Stephen Buck for you. What would you like it to say?” After the little beep, dictate your message. It’s important to remember that Siri won’t understand the grammar or punctuation of your message. This will need to be included in your message (e.g. “I can’t wait to go on vacation exclamation point.”) You can also tell Siri to correct your text message as well.

  

• I also find Siri very helpful in finding the answers to quick questions. “What year was Albert Einstein born”, “What time is it in Beijing”, “How many cups in a gallon”, “What’s the definition of facetious”, “How many chucks would a woodchuck chuck” are all questions I’d prefer not to have to type out on my phone, especially when trying to prove a friend wrong on a particular topic. Getting an answer back in just a few seconds as opposed to a few minutes makes all the differences in the world. Answers to questions like this comes from the search engine WolframAlpha, who bill themselves as the “computational knowledge engine.” I can imagine the traffic numbers for WolframAlpha must have gone up considerably.
   

• It turns out Siri has quite the sense of humor, or at least the engineers that designed her. Ask Siri for a joke, and she’ll tell you she always forgets the punchline. Ask her who made her and she says, “Like it says on the box… I was designed by Apple in California.” Asking her the meaning of life will get you several different answers ranging from “42″, “I give up”, “Chocolate” or longer answers such as “That’s easy… it’s a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general.” Even ask her for a blow job, and she’ll give you the number of an escort service in your area.

What’s Buggy:

• If you try to create a reminder that includes someone with the name ‘Jan’ and you pronounce it the European way (Y sound followed by a long ‘a’ sound), it will schedule the reminder for January 1, 2012, even though you didn’t say anything about a date in your request.
• Siri doesn’t seem to do all that well when in a busy environment. If you’re in a restaurant or on the street, the chances are higher that Siri will misunderstand you. If you’re asking for a friend’s phone number, it could recommend the nearest cafe’s address for you. Programs like Shazama do well in busy environments, and Siri needs to meet those standards too.
• While not a bug, dictating to Siri requires the user to include punctuation and new paragraphs. Otherwise you’ll have one really long run-on sentence for your friends to read at the other end. If you are familiar with the app “Dragon Dictation”, it would seem that Apple has incorporated that into Siri, as the functionality is almost exactly the same.

Useful Reviews and Tips:

• Siri Is One Funny Lady – David Pogue, New York Times
• New iPhone Conceals Shear Magic – David Pogue, New York Times
• Great Siri search commands – TUAW.com
• 10 days with iPhone 4S: a personal review – TUAW.com

I see aspects of “self-dealing”, the conduct a corporate officer that consists of taking advantage of his position in a transaction and acting for his own interests rather than for the interests of the corporate shareholders, as a recent phenomenon in the Silicon Valley. It’s possible that this is exacerbated by the recent lack of IPO opportunities due to the current market conditions leading to more “creative” forms of achieving liquidity.

It essentially comes down to greediness, plain and simple. Read on.

Nick Bilton over at the New York Times Bits technology blog demonstrates it well:

On Friday evening I was in Los Angeles visiting my sister. We were at a restaurant, chatting away about life, when my sister ebulliently announced that she wanted to “Tweet about our meal.” She pulled out her iPhone, opened up the Twitter application and then proceeded to click around aimlessly trying to figure out how to send a new Twitter message. I quickly turned into a scientist in a lab and sat inquisitively watching her navigate Twitter. I didn’t offer any guidance, although she clearly needed it.

… And, like my family, she never really took to Twitter. When I asked her last year why she rarely Tweeted, she said, “Twitter is too confusing.”

… At dinner, I eventually explained that the button in the top right corner of the Twitter application is used to create a new message. Pressing it, my sister began writing, “I am loving my date night with my little brother…” and then she stopped.

“How do I include your name in the Tweet?” she asked me. “Is it the @ symbol, then a space, then your name?” I explained that the @ symbol couldn’t have a space, and that she had to write my Twitter username, not just my given name.

If you can’t fully convince those that are more technically adept than most, yet may not be computer programmers, you have a lot of explaining to do in order to gain more market share. Or improve the user experience so that you get more people tweeting what they had for dinner that night without having to add special characters.

You can read the entire article here.