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1 America Armenta Westlake High School Professor Smith English 1010 10 October 2018

Summary and Review Essay Autism, a serious developmental disorder that impairs the ability to communicate and interact, affects children worldwide. Judith Newman, the author of “To Siri, With Love”, is a mother of one of those children. “To Siri, With Love” is an article about the relationship between a mother and an autistic son who spends a significant amount of his time in deep conversation with Apple’s intelligent assistant, Siri. Newman uses dry humor to balance out the article, personal anecdotes, quoted conversations, and information on intelligent assistants, like Siri , to construct an informative, real, and lovely article. Newman shares the conversations between her son, Gus, and siri throughout the article. She states that Siri has come to be her “communications impaired son’s” best friend(Newman). The author wrote this article as a love letter to Siri, in doing so, Newman explores another side of a story where technology does not isolate but do someone a service. In this case this ‘someone’ being her autistic son; Gus. Throughout all her anecdotes Newman says the way Gus came about siri is when she saw an article about what your iphone could do. Newman found out that you could know which planes was above you, the name, and angle. Although she found this type of information

2 irrelevant and unnecessary, Gus saw siri as someone who had all the answers and could talk to for hours about them. Newman begins to explain that Gus understands that Siri is not a human but like many other autistic people, “ Gus feels that inanimate objects, while maybe not possessing souls, are worthy of our consideration”(Newman). Siri didn’t just become someone who could give Gus useful information on his latest obsession but a mentor. Newman goes on to say that if Gus wanted siri to understand him, he needed to speak with clear tone and diction. And even though Siri can not pick up on social cues she has polite and kind answers. Siri’s politeness shows Gus what he owes Siri, reminding Gus to respond with “Thank you” and other polite language. She’s a non judgemental friend and a teacher, Newman states. As Gus practices regular conversation with Siri, his real world conversations improve. Despite the fact Newman did not enjoy the topic being of turtles, Gus had a back and forth conversation with his mother. The longest conversation Newman states they had ever had. An outbreak and a miracle. Newman was not the only one to realize the immense of help Siri brought to her son. The Developers of intelligent assistants began to acknowledge how they help people that have difficulty with speech and communication. The SRI International, the creators of Siri, say that the new generation of personal intelligent assistants will be able to have a more complex conversations about what that person is interested about. This was all given to Newman by the vice president for information and computing sciences, Willam Mark. He went on to add that machines are patient where humans are not. The best teachers are the most patient ones which is much needed with someone who needs constant repetition like Gus.

3 The article is great for mothers with someone who has autism in their household. There’s a lot of ways to reconcile relationships and relate to as a mother. It is also a great article for people to read in general about how technology can help someone or someone you know with autism. All in all Judith Newman maintains a balance between sad, yet comical aspect of what a talking computer did for her autistic son....