Siri

Most of the news on Siri now is of the 'easter eggs' - the amusing, redundant flourishes of wit hidden in the verbal patterns.

In the Book of the New Sun, Severian travels for a man whose body is mostly metal, by name Jonas.

CoftheC: "By the time Jonas returned I had mastered my grief and was making a show of examining our mounts. "The black for you," he said, "and the cream for me, obviously. Though both of them look like they outvalue each of us, as the sailor said to the surgeon who took off his legs."

Later, in Citadel of the Autarch:
  "Jonas [] had a habit of speech. Whenever he had to say something unpleasant, he softened it, made a joke of it, by attributing it to some comic situation.  The first night we were here, when I asked you your name, you said 'I lost it somewhere, as the jaguar said, that had promised to guide the goat.'  Do you recall that?"
   He shook his head.  "I say a lot of foolish things."
   "It struck me as strange, because it was the kind of thing Jonas said, but he wouldn't have said it in that way unless he meant more by it than you seemed to.   I think he would have said 'That was the baskets story, that had been filled with water.' Something like that."
    I waited for him to speak, but he did not.
    "The jaguar ate the goat, of course.  Swallowed its flesh and cracked its bones, somewhere along the way."
    "Haven't you ever thought it might be a peculiarity of some town? Your friend might come from the same place I do."
    "It was a time, I think, and not a place,  Long ago, someone had to disarm fear - the fear that men of flesh and blood might feel when looking into a face of steel and glass."

Siri's banter is not an amusing afterthought.  It is the way to bring people into the practice of talking to their phone.  Conversing with your phone is as big a UI step change as multitouch.  Once again, Apple are to be congratulated.

(only other Siri info I have: Siri Keaton, protagonist of Blindsight by Peter Watts.)