Siri, the smart personal assistant that made a splash debut last year along with the iPhone 4S now talks Spanish. Is Siri ready for Costa Rica? Will she (it’s a female voice) be able to understand Tico commands and the unique idioms and nuances attached to the Spanish language in Costa Rica.

Don Alonso Castro is a Tico iPhone expert whose love affair with Apple iDevices started with an iPod Nano years ago. He then became an Apple addict, and when the iPhone finally arrived in Costa Rica he turned to the blogosphere and started iPhoneti.co, a journal that is part of the Ticoblogger platform. He recently set out to test the new beta Spanish-speaking Siri to see how she would fair in Costa Rica, and came up with some interesting observations. First, a brief background on Siri:

The preview of the Apple iOS 6 mobile operating system took place earlier this week during the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, California. According to the official press release:

“Apple today previewed iOS 6, introducing over 200 new features to the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, and released a beta version to iOS Developer Program members. iOS 6 will be available to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users this fall as a free software update. New iOS 6 features include: an all new Maps app with Apple-designed cartography, turn-by-turn navigation and an amazing new Flyover view; new Siri features, including support for more languages [including Spanish].”

Mr. Castro’s first test of the beta iOS and Siri in Costa Rica yielded the following results:

• Siri’s understanding of Spanish is rather impressive, and her responsiveness over a Wi-Fi connection pleased Mr. Castro. He did not test Siri over a 3G connection.
• She gets a bit confused when trying to discern between “correos” and “mensajes”, as in email and text messages. This confusion extends to prepositions, according to Mr. Castro. Siri understands a command such as “dile a mi esposa” (tell my wife) perfectly, but when it comes to a crude command like “mensaje para Isabel” (message to Isabel), Siri cannot disambiguate between “message to” and “message for” and thus checks email once again.
• Mr. Castro also explains that Siri does not like to be addressed in infinitives and prefers the informal second person pronominal form of address. This means that she responds to well “recuerdame”, but not “recordar.” This could prove a bit problematic in Costa Rica, since most Ticos are accustomed to the more formal and respectful “usted” form of address. Still, Mr. Castro reports that the beta version of Siri in Spanish boasts three flavors of Spanish, and his opinion is that Mexican Spanish would be adequate for iPhone users in Costa Rica.
• Apparently Siri is not yet ready to navigate the lack of street addresses in Costa Rica, and geolocation was a miss for Mr. Castro, who was in Alajuela at the time of testing but Siri placed him in San Jose. At least she admitted to Mr. Castro that she is not yet able to provide maps or search for businesses in Costa Rica. To that extent, the best mobile app for getting around in Costa Rica may still be Waze.

You can read Mr. Castro’s full review in Spanish and even watch a video of his session with Siri on his blog.