Open the pod bay doors, Siri

I'm looking forward to buying Apple's new iPhone 4S. It'll be my first venture into smartphoneland. The feature everyone is gushing about is Siri, the intelligent digital "assistant." Siri apparently understands natural language and you can ask it to do stuff. (If you ask Siri "Who are you?" it will respond: "I am a humble personal assistant." Nice touch.) Per the Apple press release, "Siri helps you make calls, send text messages or email, schedule meetings and reminders, make notes, search the Internet, find local businesses, get directions and more. You can also get answers, find facts and even perform complex calculations just by asking." Cool. Then again, Slate's tech writer Farhad Manjoo wonders if this might too much of a good thing. Siri can "set contextual reminders based on your location or people in your contacts. For instance, you can say, 'Remind me to call my wife when I leave work,' and the phone—which has learned the GPS coordinates of your office and has deduced, based on previous correspondence, the identity of your wife—will offer to make the call once it notices your location has changed," wrote Manjoo. This is fine in theory, but will it work in real life? What happens, Manjoo asked, if it calls your mistress instead of your wife? Hmm. Good point. (Memo to self: important—don't input "little black book" numbers, esp. those with 3 stars.) Once I've had a chance to field test Siri on life's battlefront, I'll check back in with a report. With luck, my bachelor life won't get more complicated than it already is. Of course if one day Siri tells me, "EJ, I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours," then I'll know I'm in real trouble. That's how Dave wound up outside asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. We know how that worked out.