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Yosemite Siri? Apple might plonk chatty assistant on your desktop - report

Patent prompts rumou... WTF is THAT? Whose finger?

A newly granted patent has revealed Apple's plans to free its mobile assistant Siri from the iPhone and unleash it upon desktops.

In a lengthy patent entitled "Intelligent digital assistant in a desktop environment", the fruity firm outlined its plans to get fanbois talking to their computers.

To activate the desktop Siri, users would have to perform as certain gesture on a touch sensitive part of the computer or say something like "hey Siri", whereupon some icon representing the assistant would pop up.

The desktop version of the assistant is likely to be much more useful than the iOS iteration, because the patent allows for onscreen elements to be highlighted, whereupon Siri can be ordered to do something with them.

In the patent is also a facility called "Using Digital Assistant as a Third Hand". Sadly, this doesn't mean Siri will do things you don't want to do, like stroke your foul pet or wash the dishes, but instead allows the user to voice activate another window.

Imagine, if you will, a Reg journalist typing away on some article or other and wanting to change the song playing on Spotify. Currently, you have to waste up to half a second of your life by clicking over to another window. This time span is clearly too much for the fanboi of the future, who will be able to use Siri to do it for them.

The patent was filed in 2013 and while the feature is not included in the public beta of the first iteration of Yosemite, OSX 10.10, it could just as well pop up in 10.11 or later.

So sorry fanbois, it looks like you'll have to let your fingers do all the work for the time being.* ®

* El Reg's backroom gremlins are fascinated by the weird alien fanboi Apple foresees fingering its touchscreens. Surely it has a few joints too many in its weirdly plastic digits? The last time we looked at a palm this closely was when a certain snow-haired six-fingered Australian dashed into the Ecuadorian embassy.

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