I don’t have much to add to the immense volume of articles concerning Siri, but I did discover one very useful feature that is not immediately obvious.
The dictation feature activated from the microphone in the keyboard is dynamically linked to the type of keyboard selected. Similar to the autocorrect feature switching dictionaries between languages, Siri will listen in French if the current keyboard is AZERTY and in English when using QWERTY.
Now the quality of the interpretation is heavily dependent on your accent. The closer it approaches a native accent, the better it will work. But I haven’t yet had a chance to test it with some people with highly regional French accents. My imitations are pretty bad so that’s not a fair test. But it’s quite funny when you speak in English to a French keyboard as the results are complete utter gibberish.
Currently performance for interpreting French is highly variable, sometimes up to 20 seconds, sometimes under 2. But English interpretation for me has been frighteningly quick. I’m hardly finished talking and the results have appeared, even when I’ve been talking for 20-30 seconds.
I suspect that this first phase of deployment is being used for server and resource sizing on the back end so that Apple can determine an average load generated by user, by language, and time of day. Then Apple will be able to ramp up the necessary resources required to meet the demand if they open up Siri to the iPhone 4S or iPad one day.
iPad split keyboard
OK, is the split keyboard any easier to use? Personally, it’s not a good fit, since I tend to be using the iPad to take notes in meetings where I’ve got the iPad on the table in front of me or on my lap.
In these cases, the split keyboard means that I have to pick it up with both hands in order to type with my thumbs, which is less comfortable for me. Plus I find that my eyes are constantly travelling back and forth tracking the letters that are on the borders of the keyboards, where on the regular keyboard, I’m in much more of a touch typing mode, where even if my hands block party of the keyboard, muscle memory combined with autocorrect is up to the task.
But like anything to do with data entry and keyboards, this is a very personal thing and I know some blackberry experts that are thumb ninjas so this may be easier for them than for me.
On the useful side, the split keyboard is slightly translucent and takes up significantly less screen real estate. Of course, less space means smaller touch targets, so this trade off needs to be taken into account.