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You'll Talk to It

Although the iPhone 4S sports a faster processor and an upgraded camera, the feature that everyone will be talking about is Siri. Siri, which replaces the Voice Control feature introduced with the iPhone 3GS, allows you to speak commands to your phone and have it do your bidding. You even activate Siri the same way as you did Voice Control: by holding down the home button on the iPhone itself, or by holding down the control button on your wired or wireless headset.

What I’ve described actually sounds just like Voice Control, but Voice Control’s speech-recognition engine was severely limited. It required a strict vocabulary and couldn’t do much more than dial your phone or play music. Siri doesn’t require a strict vocabulary—if talk like Yoda even you try, it’ll generally figure out what you’re trying to say. That one leap makes interacting with Siri seem much more natural.

Siri’s also more comprehensive than Voice Control ever was. In addition to the Phone and Music apps, it’s tied in to Messages, Calendar, Reminders, Maps, Mail, Weather, Stocks, Clock, Contacts, Notes, and Safari. It’s also linked to Wolfram Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine” that can provide answers to numerous factual questions, and Yelp, the directory of local businesses. And when all else fails, Siri will usually suggest that it perform a Web search for you.

In a rare move for Apple, the company has officially dubbed Siri a “beta”—suggesting that it’s being released in a not-quite-finished state. There are two different reasons for this. First, Siri currently only supports English (in U.S., UK, and Australian dialects), French, and German—and that’s not enough languages for Apple and its worldwide customer base. Second, the company needs to expand the number of apps and information sources to which Siri is connected.

The truth is, once you start using Siri in earnest, you’ll discover where its boundaries are. It’s great at working with text messages, but not with email. It knows a lot about weather and restaurants but nothing about movie times. Apple says that understanding the words you say is the easy part, and that Siri’s true genius is in figuring out what you want when you say those words and getting you the answer. If that’s true, Siri needs to be tied in to many more information sources and apps. (Including third-party apps, which are not capable of tying into Siri today.)

There are two scenarios in which Siri truly excels. The first of those is when you’re in a hands-free scenario, mostly likely when driving a car. (The iPhone 4S knows when you’re in a hands-free situation and becomes more chatty, reading text aloud that it might not if it knows you’re holding it in your hand.) When you get a text message, you can instruct Siri to read the message, and it will. You can then tell Siri to reply to the message, dictate the entire message, have Siri read it back to you to confirm that it makes sense, and then send it.

It’s a major step forward, though there are gaps. Siri can tell you that you have new email, and you can use it to send emails, but it won’t read your emails to you. (It’ll only read text messages aloud.) And while iOS 5 adds the nifty Notification Centre, which gives you granular control over how different apps notify you about what’s going on, there’s no option to read alerts out loud when you’re in hands-free mode. A missed opportunity.

If you aren’t driving, Siri can still be useful: In fact, the feature proves that some tasks can be done much faster through speech than through clicking, tapping, and swiping. It’s much easier to set an alarm or timer using Siri than it is to unlock your phone, find the Clock app, and tap within the app. Just say, “set a timer for three minutes,” and your phone begins to count down until your tea is ready. “Set an alarm for 5 a.m.” does what you’d expect, instantly. “Remind me to record my favourite show” and “Note that I need to take my suit to the cleaners” work, too. These are short bursts of data input that can be handled quickly by voice, and they work well.

I was impressed by Siri’s ability to understand the context of conversations. It didn’t always work, but when it did, it was magical. I asked Siri for suggestions for places to have lunch, and it provided me with a list of nearby restaurants that serve lunch. I then specified that I wanted to eat downtown, and got a narrower list of places downtown. This was so great, I tried to repeat the task later—and could never get it to work again. (To see all of this in action, check out my video chat with Siri.)

Of course, talking to your phone is not much different from talking on your phone: It’s not appropriate in all contexts. If you’re quietly reading in the library and need to set a reminder, you should use the Reminders app, not Siri. And if you’re out in public, well, you can use Siri, but you do risk people looking at you funny.

Apple’s integration of Wolfram Alpha with Siri was a smart move. If you need answers to factual questions, like the speed of light or the number of days until Christmas, Wolfram Alpha can provide the answer. Unfortunately, Wolfram Alpha’s results come in the form of images, not parseable text, so Siri can’t actually read you the reply. I was also disappointed that when Siri gives up and searches the Internet, it wouldn’t walk me through the search results and read their summaries. Most of my answers were in the first few search results summaries, but if I were driving they’d do me no good.

While Siri gets the bulk of the iPhone 4S feature hype, another speech-related technology may prove to be more important and a bigger boost to users’ productivity: Dictation. Following the lead of Android, the iPhone 4S can now convert what you say into written text in any app.

Here’s how it works: On the keyboard you’ll see a new button in the bottom row, to the left of the spacebar, with the image of a microphone on it. Tap this button and the iPhone 4S will transcribe whatever you say. It sends the results over the Internet to a server that analyses your speech and converts it into text (meaning that if you’re not online, the microphone button will disappear). I was shocked at just how fast the results came back, especially over Wi-Fi. And they were generally accurate. (Though careful viewing of my video chat with Siri will reveal that it performed an unfortunate translation of the phrase “iPhone 4S.” Embarrassing, but easily corrected.)

To get the most out of dictation, you’ll need to start thinking in punctuation. For example, to construct a decent email message, I might say, “Dan comma new paragraph What do you think about writing a review of iOS numeral five question mark I think it might be right up your alley period new paragraph Let me know what you think exclamation point.” The thing is, it works.

Speech-recognition powerhouse Nuance has offered this feature in an iOS app, Dragon Dictation, for some time now. But being able to input text by voice in any iOS app, rather than just Nuance’s, is a big step forward. However, the existence of Dragon’s app makes me wonder why this is apparently an iPhone 4S-only feature. Older iPhones could run Dragon’s app just fine. And, come to think of it, Siri was an iOS app before it was acquired by Apple.

I understand that Apple’s in the business of selling iPhone hardware, and that Siri and dictation are both features that will drive sales of iPhone 4S. But I admit that I’m skeptical that the decision to have these features work only on the iPhone 4S is rooted more in sales strategy than in technology. I can almost understand the idea that Siri might require extra processing power, but speech-to-text? That’s a feature that should be available for iPhone 4 users as well as a part of the iOS 5 update.

iOS 5 and Other Miscellany

Although it’s not an iPhone 4S-specific feature, this phone is the first device to ship with iOS 5 as its base operating system. iOS 5 is a massive upgrade that adds all sorts of features to the iPhone and iPad, but users of the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, and third- and fourth-generation iPod touch will also be able to take advantage of them.

Our full review of iOS 5 itself is forthcoming, but in the interim, a recap: iOS 5 adds support for a much more flexible notification system, including the pull-down Notification Centre interface; support for “PC-free” operation so you can set up, back up, and even update an iPhone or iPad without ever connecting it to a computer; iMessage, a system for sending messages to other devices without using SMS; Newsstand, which gives publishers more control over pushing newspaper and magazine content to iPhones and iPads; a new Reminders app; custom vibration patterns; Twitter integration; and a whole lot more.

Another feature of iOS 5 is AirPlay mirroring, which allows certain devices to display the contents of their screen on your TV via an Apple TV. This feature initially appeared to be limited to the iPad 2, since it was the only iOS device capable of mirroring its own display on an external monitor.

But guess what? The iPhone 4S has the same capability. Attach Apple’s HDMI adapter to the iPhone 4S and connect it to an HDTV, and you’ll see the contents of your screen played back on your HDTV. And if you’ve got an Apple TV, you can do this wirelessly, too.

Buying Advice

In the U.S., most users get a two-year contract when they buy a new smartphone. While some early iPhone 4 adopters will likely be eligible for a new phone in the next few months, my suspicion is that iPhone 3GS users will be at the head of the upgrade line for the iPhone 4S.

For those users, the iPhone 4S will be big deal. Sure, there’s a dramatic speed boost, but for my money the best feature they’ll gain is the shockingly bright and clear Retina display. There’s also a front-facing camera for video chat, a dramatically improved camera with HD video recording capability, and of course the option of switching to a carrier that isn’t spelled A, T, and T.

For users of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S’s charms are a bit more subtle. There’s no doubt that the iPhone 4S is faster—though the iPhone 4 is not exactly poky. The 4S camera is definitely better, but the big leap came from the iPhone 4 3GS to the iPhone 4. The jump from 4 to 4S is a bit more incremental. Siri is certainly intriguing, but in its beta state it’s unclear just how useful it will be in the long run. Over the next few months we should get a better idea about how Siri is evolving.

If you struggle with typing on your iPhone, the new dictation feature could be a huge reason to upgrade. (Though I’m still disappointed that this feature isn’t available on older models.) My father-in-law bought an Android phone about a year ago because he needed to be on Verizon and he wanted the ability to use speech-to-text; today he’d be able to choose the iPhone 4S instead.

International travellers who are also Verizon or Sprint subscribers will rush to embrace the iPhone 4S, given the flexibility that comes via the “international unlock” of the device’s micro-SIM card. And of course, fans of Sprint’s network and rates (including the only remaining true unlimited data plan out there) will finally be able to join the iPhone party.

In the end, the iPhone 4S follows Apple’s recent trajectory of iPhone releases: It’s an object of some appeal to people who last upgraded their phones a year ago, and over the next year a great many of them will find it worthwhile to upgrade to the iPhone 4S. But to all those people who’ve been hanging on to their iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, the wait is over: It’s time to upgrade without any hesitation whatsoever. The iPhone 4S has speed, a great camera, some cool voice-recognition features, and the same beautiful industrial design that was introduced in the iPhone 4. It’s destined to be immensely popular. The S, in this case, seems to stand for “sure thing.”