Almost certainly they special-case some inputs -- have you ever recited the Konami Code to Siri? What amazes me is sheer variety of questions that people ask Siri that s/he can now answer humorously. It wouldn't surprise me if they watch the number of queries (from actual users) that don't get an answer and/or fall back to Wolfram Alpha to see if there are any new ones that need special treatment.
That said, most of the information that Siri spits out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles s/he quotes (by Wikipedia authors), or the flight information for planes overhead (by airline employees).
The flight information is powered by Wolfram Alpha which appears to source it from ADS-B data via (I assume) the FAA, so that actually is entirely automated.
To be fair, most of the information that I spit out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles I've memorized, or the Hacker News comments I rephrase.
Comments
Almost certainly they special-case some inputs -- have you ever recited the Konami Code to Siri? What amazes me is sheer variety of questions that people ask Siri that s/he can now answer humorously. It wouldn't surprise me if they watch the number of queries (from actual users) that don't get an answer and/or fall back to Wolfram Alpha to see if there are any new ones that need special treatment.
That said, most of the information that Siri spits out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles s/he quotes (by Wikipedia authors), or the flight information for planes overhead (by airline employees).
The flight information is powered by Wolfram Alpha which appears to source it from ADS-B data via (I assume) the FAA, so that actually is entirely automated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...
I doubt it's from the FAA. ADS-B is trivial to monitor, there's lots of private individuals/groups grabbing this info.
To be fair, most of the information that I spit out was "written at some level by a human", such as the Wikipedia articles I've memorized, or the Hacker News comments I rephrase.