Snippet: Siri Improvements ☇

John Gruber:

I’ve noticed over the past year that Siri is getting faster — both at parsing spoken input and returning results. I use iOS’s voice-to-text dictation feature on a near-daily basis, and it’s especially noticeable there. I’ve been using a Moto X running Android 5.0 the past few weeks, so today I did a side-by-side comparison between Siri and Android’s Google Now, asking both the simple question, “What temperature is it outside?” Both phones were on the same Wi-Fi network. Siri was consistently as fast or faster…

I’ll agree with his assessment—I mostly use Siri for simple things that are easier to ask than dig through settings or apps (weather, timer, sports scores or standings, creating reminders, etc.) It sort of went from a gimmicky, sometimes-functional feature on my iPhone 5 in 2012 to something that will always work on my iPhone 6 today. I know it’s not hardware, as my iPhone 5 seemed to get better over time. Maybe it’s a mix of newer OSes, improved connectivity, and faster processing on the back end of things, but regardless it’s better. It may be easy to compare it to Google Now, but as Gruber said, the two services are vastly different. Still, it’s nice to see Apple making progress.