Siri Backlash Begins

Apparently, Siri use is starting to annoy people:

Nick Wingfield, Virtual Assistants Raise New Issues of Phone Etiquette

Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.

“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.

Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.

“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”

[…]

People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.

“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.

But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”

This is just the normal backlash against new technology. It will dissipate in the next few years. As my fried, Jamais Cascio says, ‘technology is everything that was invented after you turned fourteen.’