Siri, the personal assistant on iPhone 4S, lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls and more. Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you ordinarily talk, and it understands what you say and mean. It also knows when you’re pulling its leg and talks back. 

For all of its virtues, it has attracted more attention for its sassy answers to trick questions. One user commanded, “Beam me up.” The phone responded, “Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode.”

Google is in the know about trick questions too. After 13 years of research, some of its super smart engineers have created algorithms able to answer such questions. Ask it the meaning of life,  the universe and everything. It answers “42,” a reference to the favorite geek book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

A lot of work has gone into creating the sarcasm. The Siri group at Apple, one its largest software teams, started with an artificial intelligence project from SRI International. Now, it continually fine tunes Siri responses. It attempts to forge an emotional tie by regularly using the customer’s nickname in responses, as well as those of other important people and places in the customer’s life.
What makes today’s artificial intelligences so much fun isn’t that it can give answers to prescribed questions. Computers have done that for years. Now, they can carry on conversations about ridiculous topics. There are several answers to the same question on the iPhone and Android.