Here’s Apple’s Siri Speaking Chinese [Screenshots & Video]

Apple’s voice assistant Siri now speaks Chinese, which is quite a feat. It’s one of many new China-oriented features that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) unveiled yesterday. The update to Siri requires the latest iPhone 4S or new iPad, and the iOS 6 beta that has just rolled out.

Weibo user ‘amycc’ has been playing with Siri in Chinese and posted all the screenshots you see here (and more at the source link below). Her tests reveal that Siri retains its sass even in Mandarin Chinese, but that the beta version was also confused by some vague queries and returned an odd error message rather than an answer or a wise-crack. Here are screenshots of the virtual assistant in action:

• Setting tasks and alarms:

• Sending an email (Netease’s 186.com service), but then getting confused by a question about what to eat for dinner and, for some reason, showing a contact’s details. I hope it’s not endorsing cannibalism! Note that Apple’s tie-up with Yelp for restaurant recommendations will be useless in China.

• But Siri often failed, perhaps because it’s in its early beta stage and not just released to the public. In these two screenshots, teasing Siri about loving you caused the weird error message; that again appeared when asking about some good drinking songs: