Apple’s AI personal assistant, Siri, is famous for her seemingly bottomless well of hidden talents — and now we’ve got another to add to the list: Siri will beatbox for you, as long as you ask her to do it nicely. Her skills are a little rudimentary, so I don’t know that she’ll ever become a beatboxing sensation; however, she’s still better at it than I am, so I have to give her props for that. A for effort, Siri. A for effort.
Accessing the feature is as simple as… well, just about everything else you can get Siri to do for you: All you have to do is boot her up and say, “Siri, beatbox for me” (or, if that’s too many words for you, “Siri beatbox”). She’ll tell you, “Here’s one I’ve been practicing”; then she’ll launch into a lengthy refrain of “Boots and cats.” If you let her go long enough, she’ll pause for a moment to tell you that she could do this all day before continuing to repeat the phrase ad nauseum. It’s a work in progress, but hey, practice makes perfect, right? She looks a little like this while she’s doing it:
Why “boots and cats?” I don’t know a lot about beatboxing, but the Internet tells me that it’s one of the first lessons you learn when you’re trying to develop your beatboxing skills. I also discovered this delightful video of 11-year-old beatboxer Jerimya Reyes teaching us the “boots and cats” lesson, and it is now my new favorite thing:
As Mashable points out, Siri’s ability to beatbox isn’t a newfound talent; she’s been able to do it at least since November of 2015, and we’ve got the video proof right here:
If you want her to do something a little more elaborate than “boots and cats,” you can get creative and instruct her to do it manually:
Oh, and hey, guess what? You can make Google Translate beatbox, too:
Who knew our favorite pieces of AI held such lofty musical aspirations?
Siri will also answer a wide variety of questions with pithy and hilarious responses; that link there is a good place to start, but really, the best way to discover all of these fun tics and habits of hers is to just sit there and ask her random things. People might give you weird looks while you're doing it, but who cares? It’s worth the humor value. Trust me.
Image: Lucia Peters/Bustle
