"Google Now does a much better job, moment to moment, in anticipating the information that a user needs than Siri."

"So what can Siri do better? Have an emotional relationship with a user...."

Google Now does not attempt personality, merely efficiency, and given that company’s strengths, I think this is a good design decision. But if Apple cannot compete on sheer efficiency, can it make up for it with charm?

This is in fact one of the main uses for “personality” in humans—to make up for deficits....

Here's an illustration of how that works:



Once you know the programming is designed to smooth over the shortcomings of the product, will it still work? Maybe so. Another question is whether Apple will give us some alternative personalities. Siri comes across as a relatively perky and warm young female. That's not what everyone wants! I'd like to see some more amusing approaches. Why not a witty, bitchy older woman or a comical guy? Unfortunately, Apple won't associate itself with anything sexual, but I'm sure many users would like their computers' voice to take daring liberties with them.

ADDED: "The human brain is built so that when given the slightest hint that something is even vaguely social, or vaguely human... given the slightest hint of humanness, people will respond with an enormous array of social responses including... reciprocating and retaliating."

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"There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire..."

".... and a Zamboni clearing the ice."

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Somehow the Google mind has arrived at a more appropriate portrait for me...

... when you search for my name.



For the longest time they had a photo I'd done with an exaggerated expression pretending to have time traveled into the future. It was for a post making fun of the idea that the time stamp on a digital photograph proves when the photo was taken. (I reset the camera's date far into the future.) I'd link to that old post, but I'm afraid of boosting it somehow in the mysterious mind of Google which operates who knows how. I like the new photograph (which is actually kind of old, maybe from 2004 or 2005).

I also like the info about who else people who search for me are also searching for. Is it odd for me to be in that set? I guess not!

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"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."

I wonder if "the latest thing" was a new expression back in 1922 when F. Scott Fitzgerald started writing "The Great Gatsby." Was "the latest thing" the latest thing, that is, new slang? If so, it's even funnier to see it used sarcastically like this. What a crazy trend it would be — a fashionable sex kink?

But then maybe there actually is such a trend these days. The "cuckold fetish" is a routine subject in Dan Savage's sex advice column, e.g., "Fuck My Wife, Please!"

Anyway, the sarcasm in today's "Gatsby" sentence is sublime. There's "the latest thing" and "sit back and let" and the marvelous "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" — all of which only become funny — painfully funny — when you get to the tragically pedestrian phrase "make love to your wife."

It's also amusing that the problem is less that somebody is fucking his wife than that a nobody is fucking his wife. Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, who — if you violated the rules of the Gatsby project and go beyond the sentence — is the (supposedly) great Mr. Gatsby.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill Harshaw uses The Great Google to show that "the latest thing" was, in fact, a well-established expression. The casual use of the word "thing" seems like modern slang. There are a lot of common phrases like "the thing to do," "a [fill in the blank] thing," "it's my thing," and "the real thing" that seem like things people would have said 100 years ago.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: Much discussion about how far Mr. Nobody really got: What did "make love" mean in the 1920s?

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