You should be excited to get Siri up and running with your new Philips Hue bridge and control your lights with the power of your voice, but one annoying error might stop you. It definitely had me scouring the Internet for answers when I was setting up my smartbulb system this afternoon, and I’d love to save you that time.
Because if you’ve spent $200 on fancy lightbulbs, you probably want to start using them right away, damn it.
Now if Cupertino really wanted to make Siri something special, they would give her a head, arms and legs, and make her dance when she plays music.
Sharp Electronics has either jumped ahead of Apple or jumped the shark tank with an animated robotic smartphone called RoBoHon. It does everything your current smartphone does but with moving appendages, an adorable, futuristic face and a sweet voice to make it a very personable sidekick.
Thanks to its arrival at major retailers like Target and Best Buy, the Apple Watch is going (more) mainstream — and Apple wants potential customers to know exactly what they’ll be able to do with their new wearable devices.
In six cool new ads, Apple shows off nifty Watch features like Apple Pay, Siri, Maps, voice messaging, fitness tracking, and more.
Check them out below.
Apple is beefing up its Artificial Intelligence tech with the purchase of Perceptio, a small startup that worked on creating advanced AI systems on smartphones.
Perceptio’s specialization was figuring out how to run complex neural network algorithms without needing to share as much user data. That would seem to fall in line with Apple’s goal of providing more robust features for Siri without compromising users’ privacy in the process.
iOS 9’s new always-on “Hey Siri” feature promises to be a game changer for iPhone 6s-owning users of Apple’s AI assistant. For the first time ever, these owners won’t have to plug in their handsets in order to use Siri’s new voice activation tech.
So how exactly will this untethered “Hey Siri” improve your life? Let us count the ways…
Google voice searches just got faster and more accurate, thanks to new acoustic models that provide better voice recognition, especially in noisy environments.
Some iPhone and iPad users upgrading to iOS 9 today have been looking forward to expressing their love of tacos, burritos, and unicorns — and their disdain for everything else — using the much-touted new emojis, which include the coveted and versatile “middle finger” icon.
But unfortunately for those folks, we’re going to have to wait a little longer to start flipping things the bird.
iOS 9 won’t shock you with a bunch of whiz-bang new features or a drastic new look, but in many ways, Apple’s latest mobile operating system is more important than its two immediate predecessors. While iOS 7 and iOS 8 laid a foundation that embraced the future of mobile design, iOS 9 is making all those changes worth a damn.
Apple drops iOS 9 today, bringing a more intelligent UI, better built-in apps, a smarter Siri and much more. Our iOS 9 review shows how the new software makes everything you do on your iPhone or iPad easier — and far faster — than ever before.
The days of having a junk drawer full of stock iOS apps might finally be coming to an end.
On the way to a surprise appearance at the Fifth Ave Apple Store, BuzzFeed spent 20 minutes with Tim Cook, who revealed some iOS apps will come with a delete option soon. The Apple CEO also talked about the future of computing, 3D Touch, “Hey Siri” privacy concerns and more. Here are the most interesting tidbits from Cook’s drive-by interview:
Siri has been involved with some pretty memorable moments as of late, whether it’s saving the life of a teenager stuck under a truck, or asserting itself as the new voice interface for Apple TV.
Now you can add shutting down questions about Barack Obama’s Iran policy to the list!
Check out the hilarious video below.
Jen Folse used the Apple stage Wednesday to tell the world about Apple TV. She used her nails to express her loyalty to the company.
If you got close enough to Apple’s lone female staffer to present at the company’s fall product event Wednesday, you could see the wavy lines of blue, pink, red, yellow and white on her nails painted to look like Siri’s Apple Watch interface. Those same colors were also used in official promotions of the fall showcase.
Have a look:
In less than 24 hours Tim Cook and company will take the stage at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium to unveil Apple’s latest products. We pretty much already know everything Apple’s going to announce, but if you ask Siri to give you a hint her responses are just as maddening as they were when Apple sent out invites.
Apple updated Siri’s hints this morning in anticipation of the event, and while some of the responses begin to appear to reveal info, the digital assistant gets the last laugh in the end.
Check out Siri’s five new hints:
We’ve been waiting years for Apple to wow us with a new Apple TV that embraces gaming, controls the home and is super-easy to use — and that appears to be just what we’re going to get.
Thanks to a steady stream of leaks from the rumor mill, we already have a pretty solid idea what Apple will show us next week when it finally unveils the new Apple TV. It’s been years in the making — here’s what to expect.
The price tag for the redesigned Apple TV will start at $149, according to a new report that also outlines how Apple plans to set its new set-top box apart from Roku and Amazon’s offerings by making it ridiculously easy to use.
We love how easy it is to set up an alarm from the Apple Watch. All you have to do is say, “Hey Siri, wake me up at 7 a.m.,” and the digital assistant will put that order in for you.
But this comes a slight inconvenience: What happens to alarms after you’re done using them? Well, if you’re like me, you just turn them off to stop the horrendous buzzing on your wrist and then forget about them. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Here’s how to clear off all of those old, unused alarms with a quickness.
Apple just confirmed its big iPhone 6s event will take place September 9, and while the art on the invite didn’t offer any clues, Apple did give us one tip: Try asking Siri for hint.
Tim Cook’s not about to let his digital assistant leak details of the big event, but we decided to give it a try anyway. After begging Siri to give us a hint, a tip, anything, all we got back was more shade. But at least the replies were pretty funny.
Here are all of Siri’s hints:
iOS 8 introduced the idea of showing your most-contacted contacts in the multitasking screen. You’d simply double click on the Home button to see the list of the most recent apps as well as a row of the folks you contacted the most across the top.
If you’re looking for that feature in iOS 9, you might have noticed that the contacts are no longer in the multitasking screen. Never fear, though, they’ve just moved.
Home automation, specifically Apple’s HomeKit framework and its compatible accessories, is the latest Thing We’re Supposed to Get Excited About™. And it has a lot of promise for convenience, time-saving, and just generally feeling like you live in the future.
The first HomeKit-compatible smartplug is upon us, courtesy of iHome. The ISP5 SmartPlug is a $40 device that plugs into your wall outlet and lets you run whatever you plug into it from your iPhone, using either Siri or the companion app.
It does everything it says it will: You can set up rooms and zones, and control individual appliances or whole groups of them with a tap or quick voice command. It also lets you build “rules” to make your stuff turn on and off without your input. All of this is cool, but when you actually have one, you might struggle to think of useful ways to use it.
We have a bit of a digital-assistant war brewing in the tech world. In addition to Apple’s Siri, we have Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and, eventually, Facebook’s MoneyPenny. Everybody’s out to provide users with the most helpful fake secretaries imaginable, and even productivity app Slack is getting in on the action.
But while touting upcoming improvements to the chat platform’s helper, Slackbot, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield had some strong words about its rival in your iPhone or Apple Watch.
Siri typically works pretty well when you’re just sitting around at home — or at least, it can usually hear you just fine. Whether or not you get the results you need is another question, but a prototype device created by engineers at Duke University could one day help Apple’s digital assistant understand you just as well if you’re in a crowded room or a car.
It’ll just have to get a little smaller first.
An accidental Siri “butt dial” recently saved a teen’s life by allowing him to dial 911 while trapped under a truck, with his arms pinned down.
We’re used to having virtual assistants like Cortana diss Siri, but it’s not every day you hear one Siri voice insult another.
Now Siri’s original U.K. male voice — actor Jon Briggs, who also performed on the U.K. version of the Weakest Link — is hitting out at his replacement, calling the new British male Siri “a little insipid if I’m honest.”
Siri is looking for a way to stop you ever having to listen to your voicemails again, according to a new report.
Apple is reportedly testing a new smart voicemail feature which, among other innovations, would allow Siri to answer your calls and then transcribe the voicemails as text messages.
Everybody likes to get a good chuckle out of Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. But we really have to call its brand neutrality into question.
Despite all of the doom and gloom we’ve been hearing since the Apple Watch launched in April, including the company’s own reluctance to let us know how well the device is selling, it looks like our favorite digital helper has decided that it’s a winner.
Asking Siri “What is your favorite watch?” or “What do you think of the Apple Watch?” will get you some enthusiastic endorsements of Apple’s latest gizmo. And this is our surprised face.
Every mobile platform now ships with its very own virtual assistant, and while they all offer a similar set of basic features, Google Now and Siri are way ahead of their rivals. Google Now knows what you want and when you want it, but Siri has sass and personality, and is about to get a whole lot better with the help of Proactive.
If you were to pit the two against each other in a virtual ring, which one would come out wearing the belt? Join us as we find out in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac!