If a voice inquiry, Siri invokes a speech-to-text mechanism that transcribes what has been spoken to text. This is very difficult, by the way, particularly given the number of languages in which Siri works.

We may soon have categorical evidence that living in San Francisco is a terrible idea. IBM announced on Nov. 20 that it had created an award-winning simulation of the Earth's tectonic plates that could soon be used to make predictions about when the next great earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will occur. And its artificial intelligence system, Watson, may prove to be the computer brain that can tell us when it's time to get out of the Bay Area. A team of computer scientists at IBM, in partnership with researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, New York University and the California Institute for Technology, created a model that simulated the entire flow of mantle under the Earth's surface. The model is so complex that it had to run on the Sequoia supercomputer (the third-fastest computer in the world), which the company built for the US government.