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By Chris Chang, posted Jun 11, 2012 at 7:54 PM, 194 views,
Siri Finally Able to Speak and Understand Chinese (video)
At its WWDC keynote Monday, Apple unveiled new MacBooks and software updates that confirmed many pre-event reports and rumors. For the software part, iOS 6 is unveiled in beta form with 200 new features, and will be released to the public in the fall. Among the 200 new features, the one thing that may excite Chinese users most is the upgraded Siri, sporting the ability to speak and understand Chinese. Check out the demo after the break.
Finally, the Chinese iPhone users can use Siri on their iPhone 4S. The upgraded Siri now includes support for three dialects of Chinese — the Mainland Chinese Mandarin (Pŭtōnghuà),
the Taiwanese Mandarin, and Cantonese.
In China, 1.2 billion people speak one or more varieties of Chinese. Each of the major varieties of Chinese
has numerous dialects. For example, the Mainland Chinese Mandarin (Pŭtōnghuà) can be divided into northern, southern and south-western dialects, which are more or less mutually intelligible. What’s more, all varieties of Chinese are tonal. This means that each syllable can have a number of different meanings depending on the intonation with which it is pronounced. For example Mandarin has 4 tones, Cantonese has between 6 and 9 (it depends who you ask) and Taiwanese has 7 tones.
You may not know, Cantonese is spoken by about 66 million people in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces and Hainan island in China, and also in Hong Kong and Macau. As for the Mainland Chinese Mandarin (Pŭtōnghuà), it is spoken by possibly more people than any other language: over 1 billion. It is the main language of government, the media and education in mainland China.
So, it may sound good to hear that Siri is able to speak and understand Chinese, but we don’t think Siri is smart enough to understand the numerous dialects of Chinese. Why? Just look at the whole list of dialects of Chinese
here.
Source: Apple
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