Siri – now taking movie tickets orders

[dgstorm]

The newest update of iOS 6 is just around the corner and Siri is going to get a huge appetite for movies. Your virtual assistant is going to blossom and bloom in iOS 6.1 and from now on will be able to purchase your movie tickets.

Apparently, developers already have been testing Siri’s new capabilities and she now accepts vocal commands like “Buy two tickets to Paranormal Activity 4 for tomorrow night”. Siri will then look for theatres that are playing the movie on the specified date in your area. When the search is done, all you have to do is push the buy ticket button. Immediately, you will be redirected to the Fandango app: here you will complete the purchase. Those who don’t have it installed on their phones yet, will need to do so.

It’s only natural that Siri would handle your movie seeing business as well, she already does wonders for your planning – she can help you book dinners, find retail stores, spot deals, remind you of important birthdays and so on.

So far, there’s no information on how customers will manage to get into possession of the tickets, but current rumors seem to point towards Passbook integration. Since the number of movie theatres is quite large, there’s the suspicion that not all will abide under the same law, so Siri will have to display the theatres which are compatible with it.

Apple constantly updates Siri, adding more useful features, most of them relating to the entertainment business.

By Radu

Source - Apple to bring movie ticket purchasing to Siri with upcoming iOS 6.1 update | 9to5Mac

 

[zphone]

I think it is just stupid on apple's part that these kind of minor changes or additions to Siri require an iOS update. All of the processing is done on apple servers and all it needs is a well defined passbook API to be able to add purchases of anything. This should have been out with 6.0 along with passbook. No wonder Forstall was fired.

 

[Skull One]

I think it is just stupid on apple's part that these kind of minor changes or additions to Siri require an iOS update. All of the processing is done on apple servers and all it needs is a well defined passbook API to be able to add purchases of anything. This should have been out with 6.0 along with passbook. No wonder Forstall was fired.

Actually, if you really want to blame someone you should start with Jobs. He created the walled garden that iOS is. When Siri was created it couldn't even launch apps because of the security that is in place. Now that Siri has been given unfettered access in the garden now you have to look at the other apps. Since Passbook is only the third application to get full integration into the data stream (Facebook and Twitter were the first two), they are still learning what API calls they need. So Siri probably wasn't the issue here. They needed more API calls to get Passbook up to speed. And adding just one API call requires an iOS upgrade (along with XCode to support it if the devs are allowed to call it).