According to Brian Dunbar, a spokesman for NASA , Strassmann will work closely with NASA’s top officials, including its chief financial officer and CIO, to help streamline and modernize the space agency’s aging IT infrastructure, which comprises 10 field centers. That return is driven by increased productivity, including fewer days of work missed for mental health reasons, the study said. Siri can look up lots of information from its various online data sources, including movie times, sports scores and weather forecasts, as well as general information on just about any topic that springs to mind. Rather than doing most of its work on your phone’s processor, Siri communicates with servers in the cloud to interpret your requests and retrieve the information you need. How can people use Siri? Some systems use a special set of glasses or goggles in conjunction with other display hardware. It had access to a large amount of data via various Web sites, and could use these sites’ application program interfaces (APIs) to tap into any services they offered. Siri actually lost some capabilities upon integration with iOS, as it used to have access to far more Web sites and services than Apple has paired with to date.

She can take dictation, send text messages and e-mails, make phone calls, post to the social media sites Facebook and Twitter, launch apps, schedule appointments on your Calendar, set reminders and give you directions (now spoken step-by-step), all in response to your natural spoken commands. Siri can open apps, give you movie times and sports scores, make dinner reservations, call or send messages to people in your contact list and perform a host of other useful tasks. Siri beeps two times again in a slightly higher-pitched tone when it stops listening and starts processing. This simpler paradigm, along with a host of programmed phrases and requests it was designed to recognize and carry out, allowed Siri to guess what the user was asking and respond appropriately without having to understand every single word — with a fair amount of accuracy. Rather than try to break down entire sentences and interpret their meaning as a whole, as other natural language research has generally attempted, Siri used models of real objects and concepts, as well as how they might work together, to decipher the requests.

To meet monetary needs, NASA is shutting down its space shuttle program and shifting funding for the International Space Station. But most of these are still demonstrations of voice-recognition artificial intelligence (AI) in its infancy, able to only perform simple tasks like taking down what you say or responding to a limited number of preset commands. Even microscopic bits of dust can do a number on a watch’s precision. People can say the same thing in a number of different ways, making sentence interpretation a Herculean effort, so Siri looked for keywords and their context instead. Unlike a search engine that returns long raw lists of links related to keywords you select, Siri is designed to interpret your request, hone in on what it thinks you want, and perform actions to give you a more limited but more correct amount of data or services in return. She uses your phone’s GPS to retrieve and return information relevant to your current location. It received its current name on Nov. 29, 1963, just one week after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

You can also set relationships within your contacts, which can come in handy if you want to be able to say, “Send a message to Mom,” rather than saying her name. Anything related to mathematical computation or scientific fact is likely to come from Wolfram|Alpha. English voice is a female one. English voice. Siri beeps twice to let you know that you can speak, and the microphone icon on the screen stays lit while it’s listening to you. After it reads off the list, it will double beep for you to pick the right person via speaking or tapping the screen. The company produced a series of videos that showed people interacting with this fictitious system via a touch screen tablet and natural conversation. You’ll also need to decide on a system voltage, which you can control by deciding how many modules to wire in series. It was originally a third-party app called Siri Assistant, released in 2010 and slated for release on other platforms, but Apple bought the company, removed it from the App Store and made it a proprietary feature fully integrated with the iPhone’s operating system (iOS).