Dragon Go! as a Poor Man's Siri? Siri-ously? No. Check Out These Query Responses
If you do not have an iPhone 4S and its Siri speech recognition assistant, Nuance points out that its free Dragon Go! app for the iPhone can tie into the same Wolframalpha decision engine that Siri does. There is a gotcha, however, since I have been unable to get it to automatically be invoked even using Nuance’s own demonstration question (what is the square root of 10?).
Got Questions? Dragon Go! and Wolfram|Alpha Have The Answers!
Asking “what is the square root of 10” or any other number was correctly intepreted. But, all such questions were sent to Ask.com which, I should not, provided the correct answer. Asking Dragon Go “what is the sine of pi” interpreted it as “what is the sign of pie” and took me to Yelp which showed me a list of bakeries. I suppose a “pie” is a close enough answer since the answer should be a “0” (zero, which is somewhat circular – acually oval).
My favorite Dragon Go! response, however, was to the question “how far is it from San Francisco to Honolulu?” Wolframalpha itself provides the correct answer of 2,394 miles with the caveat that it is assuming I meant the city in California and not the one in Costa Rica or Argentina. Dragon Go!, however, handed me off to Google Maps which helpfully suggested I drive from San Francisco to Seattle, turn right onto N. Northlake Way and then Kayak across the Pacific Ocean for 2,756 miles. An outrigger canoe might have been more appropriate.
