Siri - page 24

Your next MacBook will get more than just a speed bump, with Intel’s powerful new Skylake chips bringing intense performance (and maybe better battery life) to the new laptops we’ll all be drooling over soon.

Find out exactly how these new processors will make new MacBooks rock, plus what you need to know about iOS’ brick-inducing “Error 53,” how to make Siri work even harder for you on your Apple TV, and which are the best ergonomic accessories for your Mac in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Here are the week’s top stories.

Misunderstandings and repeated requests are among the hurdles that everyone who uses Siri — or any digital assistant, for that matter — have to deal with to run things with their voice, but some groups have it even harder than others.

If I want to make the smartbulb in my bedroom lamp turn white, for example, Siri always interprets “Make the Bedroom white” as “Make the Bedroom light,” and I can’t even imagine why I would be saying that. I can say, “Make the Bedroom green” or any other color, and it will work. But in order to get that direct-sunlight jam happening, I have to be more specific, like, “Make the bedroom light white.” And that’s not the worst problem to have with miraculous future-tech, but it is kind of hard to say.

But it could be worse; I could belong to one of the groups that have difficulty having even the most basic of interactions with Siri. And their problems don’t stem the program’s occasional deafness but rather its inherent incompatibility with how they speak.

We’re talking about Texans, y’all.

Use the power of your voice to watch TV. That’s not something out of Star Trek, but the promise of Siri on the fourth-generation Apple TV.

Beyond basic commands to find your favorite TV shows and movies, you might not know how much Siri can actually do for you. But using Siri Apple TV voice commands will unlock loads of helpful features, including reading onscreen labels, getting more in-depth info about whatever you’re watching, navigating various screens, and even playing music on demand.

And it’s bound to get better yet, as the new tvOS beta is bringing Siri dictation to search fields and the App Store.

Here’s how to get the most out of Siri on your Apple TV.

Apple is finally correcting an issue with Siri that it has known about since at least 2011.

The problem has appeared when users ask the virtual assistant to show nearby facilities that offer abortion services. For years, the results have directed people toward adoption centers, which is kind of the opposite of what they were looking for.

Apple says it’s made improvements to the search algorithm since it first identified the problem, but some users are still getting the undesired suggestions.

If you’ve got a quick bit of math to figure out on the go, why bother tapping into the Calculator app, which you’ve probably got stuffed in some sort of folder on your third page or so?

Even though we’ve been using Spotlight on the Mac for years now to figure out quick mathematical facts, it’s also included in the iOS version of Spotlight, making doing quick bits of math super easy.

Here’s how to use it.

Siri’s latest trick has it setting the tempo for the Internet’s beatboxing magic.

Apple’s digital assistant may not be the best beatboxer on its own, but it can provide the backdrop for some more talented people. And those people have found a way to get Siri to lay it down so that they can spit hot fire and record it for our entertainment.

All it takes is a little math.

Okay, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen Siri do: multiply one trillion to the tenth power to lay down a hypnotic background beat for a bunch of cool kids to rap to.

The Apple Watch is designed with the Digital Crown in the same place as where traditional watches have their own crown to set the time. It’s a design choice that helps us think of this new tiny computer on our wrist as something comfortable and familiar.

But there’s no reason the Digital Crown should remain on the right, as it defaults to if you’re wearing your Apple Watch on your left wrist.

In fact, flipping it around can make things on your Apple Watch even better. Check it out.

We think Siri’s been holding out on us. It turns out that Apple’s digital assistant has been quietly working on a skill that we only recently discovered.

It’s not very useful, but it should give you a smile: A simple request will make Siri beatbox for you.

This might be the most divisive news of the day: RealDoll creator Matt McMullen is currently working with artificial-intelligence scientists to create a fusion between digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and synthetic companions. It could be the most amazing news you’ve ever heard, or it might be terrifying and make you feel like spiders are crawling on you.

Regardless of how much or little it creeps you out, however, it’s definitely interesting.

In addition to rounding up the best stories of the year, we’re also showcasing the weirdest of 2015, and we can’t do that without including the sickest burns people laid down over the past 12 months.

It’s always strange when companies and CEOs snip and snap at each other like annoyed children. We should expect them to be above that sort of behavior, but guess what? They totally aren’t.

Here are some of the most blistering insults of the year.

You know how it is: You press and hold the Home button to set a quick timer and Siri comes back all loud, “OK! Setting the timer! I’m in suspense!”

Or some such nonsense. Sure, you want to confirm that Siri’s not, say, adding an event to your calendar or calling your Aunt Tilly instead of setting a timer, but maybe you don’t need Apple’s AI helper to be all chatty about it.

Here’s how you can tamp down Siri’s sometimes-annoying banter.

Your smart life is about to get even smarter with a new set of software development tools that will let coders include world-class speech recognition and natural language processing — the same stuff that powers Siri, Apple’s personal digital assistant — to thermostats, refrigerators, apps and, yes, even robots.

The folks at Nuance have created a new system, currently in beta, to allow any company to include code with language commands that are specific to their hardware or apps. It’s called Nuance Mix, and anyone can sign in and create their own speech-recognition code to work with their apps or connected devices.

“Any developer, big or small, can come in and define a custom set of use cases,” Nuance’s Kenn Harper told Cult of Mac during a demo of the SDK. “You’re going to start talking to everything at home and work — speech is about to get more ubiquitous.”

Siri is loaded with fun Easter eggs. However, its latest addition — created in collaboration with the Cerebral Palsy Foundation — isn’t flippant or sarcastic like some of the AI assistant’s other one-liners; it’s just good advice.

Ask Siri how to start a conversation with someone with a disability, and she’ll answer, “It’s easy. Just say, ‘Hi.’”

In a brand-new iPhone 6s ad, director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) looks to Siri for help in his directorial duties.

The spot, called “iPhone 6s – On the Set,” has the director trying to explain to some actors (presumably on his upcoming live action-ish adaptation of The Jungle Book) the finer points of playing flying squirrels.

Check it out below:

The whole tech world is losing its mind with Star Wars mania, and Apple’s no exception. Hidden within Siri is a neat reference to George Lucas’ epic space opera — accessible when you use the iconic “I am your father” line from the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

Check out some of Siri’s best responses below.

As Apple rolls out Siri beyond the iPhone and into shared devices like the iPad and, most recently, Apple TV, Cupertino’s engineers have been working on a way of letting its voice activation technology pick up individual users, and offer them customized options based on their past preferences.

Published today as the patent “User profiling for voice input processing,” the technology would allow Apple to make better use of Siri (and voice recognition in general) as it moves into new fields like home automation and vehicles.

The new Apple TV is here, and there’s no doubt it’s the best set-top box we’ve seen from Cupertino, with powerful new hardware and the tvOS operating system, Siri integration — and most importantly, support for third-party apps and games.

If you’re into movies and TV shows, or playing the greatest iOS games on your big screen, the new Apple TV is probably at the top of your wish-list if you haven’t already bought one. But how does it compare to the other products Apple has launched this year? Is it better than the rest?

Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over that very question!

Apple TV’s Siri-enabled universal search feature is set to come to Apple Music early next year, Apple has confirmed.

The feature means that Apple TV users will be able to request to find songs, artists or albums in the way that they can currently find movies or TV shows.

Siri has a few extremely scientific and mathematical costume suggestions for Saturday’s festivities, but good luck figuring out how to implement most of them.

You can get prompts from Apple’s digital assistant by asking, “What should I be for Halloween?” to your favorite iOS device. Siri’s ideas aren’t bad if you can find a way to make them work. Check out a few of them below, which we captured from an Apple Watch.

If you want Siri to tell you everything there is to know about music you might need an Apple Music subscription to get the right answers.

The three-month trial period for Apple Music has finally ended, and it appears that not signing up for the monthly service may cost you a bit of Siri functionality.

If you’re even slightly interested in having smart lighting for your house, the new Philips Hue bridge, which supports Apple’s HomeKit automated-home framework, should be in your shopping cart right now.

Controlling your lights from your phone is one level of crazy future-stuff, but doing it with your voice drops you into an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And you definitely want your home to feel like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Maybe there aren’t a ton of new features in iOS 9, but you may find yourself getting tighter with Siri.

Siri is out to earn the title of “Best Assistant” with a series of new tricks aimed at making your life easier.

You no longer have to set a time for Siri to remind you to do tasks. You will automatically get reminders once you arrive or leave a location. No time to read an email or an interesting article? Ask her to remind you later and she will do so.

Siri can call up any photo you like based on a location or timestamp. She can also give you sports scores without directing you to a website, can convert measurements and, if you have a shiny new iPhone 6s, there is no need to press the home button to summon her. Just say, “Hey Siri.”

To see how Siri worked for me, check out the video below.

Ford owners with a second-generation Sync infotainment system can now get Apple’s Siri Eyes Free feature for iPhone on the car dashboard, thanks to a new Sync 3.8 update.

The second-gen Sync system is found on Ford vehicles made since 2011 and earlier, but the company is just now making Siri Eyes Free available on its vehicles, even though Apple rolled out the feature with iOS 6 back in 2012.

Siri can be silently put to work against you, thanks to a new hack discovered by French security researchers that allows attackers to transmit orders to the digital assistant via a radio.

The hack also works on Google Now and utilizes the headphone cord as an antenna to convert electromagnetic waves into signals that register in iOS and Android as audio coming from the microphone. José Lopes Esteves and Chaouki Kasmie — the two French researchers that discovered the hack — wrote in their paper that hackers could use the attack to get Siri and Google Now to send the phone’s browser to a malware site, or send spam and phishing messages to friends.

“The sky is the limit here,” says Vincent Strubel, the director of their research group at ANSSI. “Everything you can do through the voice interface you can do remotely and discreetly through electromagnetic waves.”