Questions you might ask Siri

Asking for stock price updates or weather forecasts might be useful but it barely touches on what Siri, combined with the Wolfram Alpha, can do. The pairing of great voice recognition with a seriously impressive search engine allows Siri to answer all sorts of questions that, under normal circumstances, you might answer by first finding a specialist database on Google then trawling through said database for the information you need.

One I picked up from a site (questionsforsiri.com, or something similar) is "Who is Luke's father?" which Siri correctly answer through Wolfram Alpha (Google gets this one right as well). Spoiler - the correct answer, for anyone who hasn't seen The Empire Strikes Back, is Darth Vadar.

In a similar vein, Siri can tell you who shot JR (Google doesn't know the answer to this one but will offer links to several sites, some of which might have the information), although you may find that the younger generation hasn't the faintest idea why this might be important. Some of them haven't even heard of Dallas, let alone JR, which just goes to show how standards have slipped since the mid-80s (it could be argued that knowledge of ancient soap opera plots is less than entirely useful).

Fans of the late Douglas Adams (and who, in all honesty, could claim not to have been delighted by his writing?) can take comfort from the fact that Siri knows the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42 (anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about should read TheHitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or ask a white mouse for help). Google pretty much gets this one as well but it's an awful lot of typing.

Obscure pieces of UK history are a bit more tricky. Siri wasn't able to tell me who the fifth man was (not surprising, really, since definitive identification has apparently never been made) or give me the location of Shergar or Lord Lucan (again, not totally surp rising). Siri did correctly capture each of these questions, however, so preparing a web search is child's play.

Siri can also be confused by non-specific references to historic events. "When was the civil war?" yields the correct answer for an American (Friday 22nd April 1861 to Sunday 9th April 1865) but, as I'm asking in British English, this answer is slightly disappointing. Asked "When was the War of the Roses?", Siri gave me details of the Danny De Vito film, including gross receipts and release date but of the epic struggle between York and Lancaster it (or more properly, Wolfram Alpha) knows nothing.

Overall Siri is hugely impressive. The voice recognition appears to be very accurate, correctly identifying almost all the words spoken to it; Siri's ability to answer questions is limited by the quality of the databases and search engines it uses, not its voice recognition. As Wolfram Alpha improves and more databases are made available to Siri, this feature can only improve. Looks like a winner for Apple.