HomePod is expected to get even smarter this fall when Apple rolls out a big software update.
A new report claims the $349 device will be able to handle phone calls, retrieve your voicemail, and run multiple timers. It could also give you the ability to search for songs by using their lyrics, and to translate languages.
Tom Gruber, the last Siri co-founder to have been employed at Apple, has left the company. Gruber was previously head of Siri’s Advanced Development group, but has now retired to focus on his interests in photography and ocean conservation.
His fellow Siri co-creators Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer left Apple a long time ago. They created Siri as an independent app before selling it to Apple in 2010.
iOS 12 users can finally enjoy Fortnite again after Apple’s latest beta fixed random game crashes.
A problem with downloading Netflix titles has also been eliminated, but a number of new bugs have been introduced with this release — including on that breaks the new Screen Time feature.
Siri users looking forward to a new app called Shortcuts will have a place called Sharecuts to suggest and swamp custom voice commands for the Apple-based digital assistant.
Sharecuts creator, Guilherme Rambo, wanted to build a website where people could share shortcuts and suggest ways for fine-tune existing ones. It is currently a black-and-white page, but will be more colorful and robust by the time Shortcuts comes out this fall with the launch of iOS 12.
Siri has plenty of problems, but it just got one more: a lawsuit claiming Apple’s technology is infringing on patents belonging to another company.
The company in question, Advanced Voice Recognition Systems, is suing Apple for infringing on its previously held patent “Speech Recognition and Transcription Among Users Having Heterogeneous Protocols.”
Apple’s allegedly offending products include *deep breath* the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, HomePod, and Apple TV. Everything that runs Siri, basically!
Craig Federighi is no longer in charge of Siri. Responsibility for Apple’s troubled voice assistant has been given to John Giannandrea, who is now in charge of all Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts.
Siri is seen as poor competition for Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Assistant. Its weakness is hurting sales of Apple products, including the HomePod.
Apple said Siri would be smarter with iOS 12. The digital assistant will also multitask with the help of a native app.
A single command will kick Siri into high gear through an app called Siri Shortcuts, now available in a beta version to developers through the TestFlight platform.
Developers received an early 4th of July present from Apple today in the form of banging batch of new betas for iOS 12, watchOS 5 and tvOS 12.
The third beta for iOS 12 arrives two weeks after Apple seeded the last software update to developers that contained a number of UI tweaks and performance enhancements. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV all received some software loving from Apple today, but it looks like the next macOS Mojave beta is still baking.
Most people would agree that Siri is way behind its competitors. But Apple recently made moves that indicate it’s working to improve this voice assistant.
A British survey discovered what smartspeaker owners actually use them for. This could help Apple decide what new features to add to Siri, as well as the ones that need shoring up.
Siri Shortcuts are the iOS way to automate actions you do over and over. The WWDC 2018 keynote gave an examples of chaining together a bunch of these actions into one shortcut — order your favorite “coffee,” and give you directions to work, or switch on the lights at home one whole hour before you get there in order to, I don’t know, waste electricity? To trigger these little automations, you just tell Siri, using a pre-chosen keyword/name.
However, you don’t alway want to put together lots of steps. Sometimes you just want Siri to carry out a single action with a Shortcut. For instance, opening up your favorite news site in Safari, or sending a message to your spouse, or viewing your most recent photos. The good news is, you can do all of these right now, even without the fancy new Siri Shortcuts app.
You no longer need to be a developer to try Apple’s biggest software updates of 2018.
Public testers can now get their hands on the first public beta builds of iOS 12 and tvOS 12 that bring tons of UI changes and feature improvements to the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
Siri on HomePod is acceptable for quickly playing an album or a playlist, or even for adding a track to the existing up-next queue. But what if you want to switch the order of some songs in that queue, or delete tracks? Or maybe just use your iPhone to skip tracks, or control the volume of your HomePod without having to talk to the damn thing all the time?
Today we shall find out how.
The 2018 World Cup will be loaded with one-name football stars: Ronaldo, Messi, Isco, Neymar and, new to the lineup, Siri.
Apple’s voice-directed digital assistant will keep tabs on the World Cup schedule, scores and stats across all devices thanks to updates to sports support for users in Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Malaysia, Turkey, Thailand, Israel, Saudi Arabia and host Russia. Sports support now comes to Siri users in 35 countries.
Apple has issued an updated watchOS 5 beta for Apple Watch.
The new build comes just one week after the first was seeded to developers during WWDC. Apple was forced to pull it shortly after its release following reports that it had bricked some Apple Watch Series 2 units.
Apple fans that have been complaining for years that Siri is dumb might be a little creeped out by how much better the digital assistant is in iOS 12.
With the new Siri suggestions Apple introduced this week, your iPhone will now be able to prompt you about events you haven’t even told it about. One developer posted his experience of Siri learning about a lunch just through iMessage.
Prepare to be impressed:
With so much to digest during Apple’s big WWDC keynote on Monday, it was easy to miss some of the finer details.
You might be aware of every new feature coming to iOS 12 this fall. You might have memorized the changes to macOS, too. But did you know that more than 20 million people are now building apps for Apple devices, or that 10 billion Siri requests are processed every month?
Here are some fascinating numbers you probably missed during WWDC.
In the battle of digital voice assistants, people often mock Siri for lagging behind competing products from Amazon and Google. During Monday’s WWDC 2018 keynote, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, glossed over those failings, calling Siri the “world’s most-used digital assistant.”
What he neglected to mention was the increasing frustration of Siri users expecting more from a voice assistant. From simple requests returning inaccurate results to the inability to performthat he compound actions, Siri was in desperate need of attention going into WWDC. But will the Siri upgrades in iOS 12 do the trick?
iOS 12 is shaping up to be one biggest software updates Apple’s ever released and it’s so stuffed with major and minor new additions there wasn’t time to go over a lot of them at the WWDC 2018 keynote.
We’ve been combing through the first iOS 12 beta looking for all the new goodies and have found some underrated new features that will totally change how you use your iPhone and iPad this fall.
These are the little iOS 12 features you need to know:
Apple’s WWDC 2018 keynote lasted nearly 130 minutes and was jam-packed with new software goodies for developers and regular old Apple fanboys.
But if you were hoping to see some shiny new hardware unveiled at today’s event, you were in for some big disappointments. Apple is doubling down on its software game. And even though they didn’t have any new physical toys to show off, Tim Cook and company still managed to pull out some big surprises.
Stereo-pairing has been one of the most anticipated HomePod features and now that it has finally arrived, it was definitely worth the wait.
HomePod owners can now pair two or more speakers together to create rich stereo soundscapes in their house for an audio experience that’s unlike any other. CultCast producer Erfon Elijah went ears-on with the new feature and says his finely tuned ears were tingling with delight from the sounds HomePod can blast out. The 360-degree sound is so enveloping that it’s hard to tell where it’s even coming from.
Listen to the difference:
Apple will introduce a Beats-branded $250 HomePod smart speaker at next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, predicts Apple analyst Gene Munster.
Munster’s other predictions for the big Apple developer event include new HomePod capabilities, additional Siri abilities, extra Core ML extensions, and more.
Adding a smartphone-controlled sprinkler system to your house just became insanely affordable feature thanks to a little black box made by the folks at Elgato.
The Eve Aqua aims to turn dumb water faucets into smart water systems by adding Apple’s HomeKit technology to the scene. Watering your lawn is as about to become just a Siri command away.
WWDC is right around the corner, which means we’re about to get our very first look at Apple’s next major update to iOS.
We’re expecting big things from iOS 12, including a whole host of improvements that will make our devices more stable, and plenty of welcome bug fixes. Apple will surely surprise us with some nice new features, too.
Here’s our lengthy wish list for this update, which includes a Home screen overhaul, a more powerful FaceTime, better multitasking, and more!
The iPhone dominates smartphone sales charts. The iPad is so ubiquitous that, for many, its name is a catch-all term for any tablet. The Mac is the most desirable computer out there. But the HomePod? Not so much.
According to figures released this week, Apple’s smart speaker made up just a tiny 6 percent share of all smart speaker shipments for the first quarter of 2018. What is Apple doing wrong? And what could it do to turn things around? Here are five suggestions for HomePod improvements we’d like to see.
With iOS 11, Apple introduced a “Do Not Disturb” feature that texts callers to let them know you’re driving or otherwise engaged if they try and phone when you’re busy. But a future version of the technology could perform a more useful feat by texting context-specific responses to the person calling.
In a patent application published today, Apple describes how your iPhone could analyze available information — ranging from fitness tracking apps to your calendar and location information — to figure out the most useful response to a message.