With iPhone 4S, voice recognition comes of age

The rumors online had predicted the second coming — or, rather, the fifth coming. It would be wedge-shaped! It would be completely transparent! It would clean your basement, pick you up at the airport and eliminate unsightly blemishes!

Instead, what showed up was a new iPhone that looks just like the last one: black or white, glass front and back, silver metal band around the sides. And on paper, at least, the new phone does only four new things.

THING 1: There’s a faster chip, the same one that’s in the iPad 2. More speed is always better, of course. But it’s not like people were complaining about the previous iPhone’s speed.

THING 2: A much better, faster camera — among the best on a phone. It has a resolution of eight megapixels, which doesn’t matter much, and a new, more light-sensitive sensor, which does. Its photos are crisp and clear, with beautiful color. The low-light photos and 1080p high-definition video are especially impressive for a phone. There’s still no zoom and only a tiny LED flash — but otherwise, this phone comes dangerously close to displacing a $200 point-and-shoot digital camera.

THING 3: Speech recognition. Crazy good, transformative, category-redefining speech recognition.

Exactly as on Android phones, a tiny microphone button appears on the on-screen keyboard; whenever you have an Internet connection, you can tap it when you want to dictate instead of typing. After a moment, the transcription appears. The sometimes frustrating on-screen keyboard is now a glorified Plan B.

But dictation is only half the story — no, one-tenth of the story. Because in 2010, Apple bought a start-up called Siri, whose technology it has baked into the iPhone 4S. Siri is billed as a virtual assistant: a crisply accurate, astonishingly understanding, uncomplaining, voice-commanded minion. No voice training or special syntax is required; you don’t even have to hold the phone up to your head. You just hold down the phone’s Home button until you hear a double beep, and then speak casually.

You can say, “Wake me up at 7:35,” or “Change my 7:35 alarm to 8.” You can say, “What’s Gary’s work number?” Or, “How do I get to the airport?” Or, “Any good Thai restaurants around here?” Or, “Make a note to rent ‘Ishtar’ this weekend.” Or, “How many days until Valentine’s Day?” Or, “Play some Beatles.” Or, “When was Abraham Lincoln born?” In each case, Siri thinks for a few seconds, displays a beautifully formatted response and speaks in a calm female voice.

It’s mind-blowing how inexact your utterances can be. Siri understands everything from, “What’s the weather going to be like in Tucson this weekend?” to “Will I need an umbrella tonight?”

It’s even more amazing how Siri’s responses can actually form a conversation. Once, I tried saying, “Make an appointment with Patrick for Thursday at 3.” Siri responded, “Note that you already have an all-day appointment about ‘Boston Trip’ for this Thursday. Shall I schedule this anyway?” Unbelievable.

Siri can perform an incredible range of tasks. She can get stock prices, weather, currency and price conversions, dictionary definitions, measurement conversions, math totals. She lets you use your voice to edit or check the Clock, Calendar, Notes and Address Book apps, the new Reminders app and the renamed Music (formerly iPod) app.

She can read your text messages to you — and let you respond, all by voice (big news for drivers). She uses GPS to know where you are, so you can say things like, “Remind me to pick up the dry cleaning when I leave work” — and she’ll do it.Apple says Siri will improve with time — both because she adapts to you, and because Apple itself will periodically upgrade her brain.

But already, Siri saves time, fumbling and distraction, and profoundly changes the definition of “phone.” I find myself using certain commands constantly, especially “Wake me at,” “Call,” “Send a message to,” “Give me directions to,” and “Remind me.”

It’s a shame that Siri isn’t available for older iPhones. Apple says that she requires the 4S’s faster processor, although before Apple bought the company, there was a Siri app that ran just fine on other models. Most of the new software features in the 4S, however, are indeed available to older iPhones, thanks to the free iOS 5 software update.

Some of its 200 new features play Android catch-up. For example, a tidy, attractive Notification Center appears when you swipe a finger down the screen. In one place, it lists all of your missed calls, text messages received, coming appointments and other updates — a tremendous convenience.

You can now fire up the camera right from the Lock screen, saving you a detour to the Home screen. You can now press the Volume Up button to snap a picture; it falls exactly where a real camera’s shutter button would be. Basic photo-fixing tools (auto-color adjust, cropping and red-eye removal) are now built in.

If you’re sending a text, photo or video to another iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, iOS automatically uses a new, proprietary service called iMessages instead of sending a traditional text message. (It’s not a separate app; it’s built into the existing Messages app.

These iMessages appear in blue text bubbles; regular text messages appear in green.) This new service lets you see if the recipient has read your message yet, and it can save you money; instead of counting as a cellular text message, each i-to-i message goes over the Internet and costs you nothing.

The question isn’t what’s in a name — it’s what’s in a phone. And the answer is: “A lot of amazing technology. And some of it feels like magic.”