Siri is a character in your phone. And Apple has decided, she needs some new dialog.
The company posted a job listing earlier this month to LinkedIn looking for a writer/editor to work on Siri. Among other tasks this new creative will "help the Siri team evolve Siri as a distinct, recognizable character." This is a fascinatingly weird job. I'm going to send my resume with the objective sentence stating, "To secure a position as the personality of an artificial intelligence." (No, just kidding, I'm staying at The Atlantic.)
Here are the most interesting bits from the listing:
We're looking for a uniquely creative individual to help us evolve and enrich Siri, our virtual personal assistant. Siri's known for 'her' wit, cultural knowledge, and zeal to explain things in engaging, funny, and practical ways. The ideal candidate is someone who combines a love for language, wordplay, and conversation with demonstrated experience in bringing creative content to life within an intense technical environment...The successful candidate will:Develop and write original dialog to support new Siri capabilities; refresh and refine existing Siri dialog.Work closely with interaction designers in formulating utterances, and in specifying them and their parameters for engineering staff.Develop a rapid editorial process and workflow for eliciting ideas (from internal, external, and user sources), creating and refining dialog, soliciting internal reviews, getting dialog into production, and learning from user reaction to it.Ensure the consistency and quality of Siri dialog from all sources.Help the Siri team evolve Siri as a distinct, recognizable character.Co-lead a working group on cross-cultural / multi-language issues.
I don't know who would be the best at this job, but I do know who would be the worst: whoever created and wrote Jar Jar Binks. Actually, I take that back. Can you imagine how awesomely terrible it would be if Siri *was* Jar Jar Binks?
Think of all the money Apple would make from replacing the phones that people violently destroyed with their own bare hands and a rusty, sharpened spoon.
Via Zach Seward
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