Here’s what Apple says you can do with their new Siri voice assistant program; you can ask for directions, schedule an appointment, make dinner reservations, find the nearest locksmith, play your favorites tunes, set an alarm, and other practical tasks.
And I’ve heard that Siri can provide hours of fun – just ask her if she wants to marry you, or where you can find some drugs or dispose of a dead body. Like I said, I’ve heard that she provides some interesting answers to creative questions…I definitely don’t know anything about having a few drinks and testing Siri’s capabilities.
But speaking of Siri and beer, the folks at RedPepper have developed a new way to utilize Siri: The Beeri bot.
Using an RC truck, a Twitter account, and Siri, they developed a physical/virtual hybrid Rube Goldberg device of sorts that in the end, produces a nice glass of beer. All you have to do is ask Siri to pour you one.
Here’s how they did it:
First, they made a Twitter account @beeribot. Then, they used the tweet via text message ability to tweet out “could you pour me a beer” from that account.
The Beeri device is the RC truck. It’s strapped with a beer and aimed at a “puncture wall.” They “rigged her up an Arduino Uno w/ WiFi shield and set it up to poll @beeribot’s stream via the Twitter REST API every 10 seconds.”
When Beeri sees a new Tweet containing the word “pour” she triggers the sequence of preprogrammed pour commands (go, stop, adjust) that interface with the truck’s circuit board to control her movement. Her route is preprogrammed (drive straight) until her two proximity detectors sense her moving away from the puncture wall after impact. This allows her to halt the driving sequence and adjust to a 6 inch depth in order to get the beer to enter the funnel.
And the tasty, tasty beer funnels into the glass sitting below. Check out the process:
Beeri from redpepper on Vimeo.
Yes, I know the yield is low. But come on, you’ve gotta credit the vision. If Siri really wants to be my personal assistant, she’s gotta know that there is no way to help me out more than pouring me a beer. And that’s a fact.
If beer isn’t on the top of your priority list, this concept still has potential. The basic structure of setting up the Twitter account and using Siri to activate a device with the text-to-tweet functionality is pretty neat. You could wire the device to do other things besides popping open a can of beer.
But really, why would you want to?