Hackers Find Quirky Uses for Siri

Matt Reed holds up his new iPhone 4S and speaks to Siri, the voice recognition software recently introduced by Apple. “Could you pour me a beer, please?” he asks. Moments later, a miniature, remote-controlled car with a can of Dale’s Pale Ale strapped to the grille zooms across a conference room table and into a spike, puncturing the can. Beer spills down a funnel and into a pint glass. Reed takes a gulp.

The digital beer order—staged and filmed by ad agency Redpepper on Oct. 20 and posted to the Web—probably wasn’t what Apple had in mind when it dubbed Siri a virtual personal assistant. With a few spoken words, the artificial-intelligence feature helps iPhone users schedule appointments, write text messages, and check the local weather. Apple hasn’t offered its thousands of outside developers any tools to adapt Siri technology for their own apps. But that hasn’t stopped tinkerers from finding workarounds and turning Siri into everything from a bartender to a bank teller to a fun way to send a tweet. “Being able to talk to a computer has been a dream for a while,” says C.C. Laan, an iPhone developer at Laan Labs who rigged a system for unlocking his apartment door by saying to Siri, “Tell door to open.”