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Is there any limit to Siri‘s abilities? The voice-controlled personal assistant can already help you hide a dead body (in the US anyway), update you on the weather and write messages for you, and now it seems it’ll soon be able to control your TV.
The forthcoming Apple TV set that Steve Jobs seemed to confirm in his biography will be voice-controlled, according to The New York Times. We brought you news it would come packing Siri, now it seems Apple is doing away with the remote control completely.
The “I finally cracked it” moment referred to in Jobs’ biography seems to be the moment Jobs realised the set could be voice controlled. “It’s the stuff of science fiction,” writes Nick Bilton. “You sit on your couch and rather than fumble with several remotes or use hand gestures, you simply talk: ‘Put on the last episode of Gossip Girl.’ ‘Play the local news headlines.’ ‘Play some Coldplay music videos.’ Siri does the rest.”
And it seems a question of when, rather than if, Apple will release the TV. “Absolutely, it is a guaranteed product for Apple,” someone close to the company previously told Bilton. “Steve [Jobs] thinks the industry is totally broken.” The company still has a lot of work to do on the product, it being the first of its kind, but it could announce it at the end of next year to be released in 2013. In which case we probably wouldn’t leave the house for most of the year.
Other rumoured features include FaceTime and iCloud, according to an analyst. Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that an Apple TV set would “have the simplest user interface you could imagine.” When it works, it doesn’t get much simpler than talking to a device.
Image credit: New York Times.
