Siri - page 28

Want to see something neat to start off your day? How about a Siri RSS reader?

RSS readers, as most readers will be aware, are great at aggregating news headlines from a variety of different websites that get updated throughout the day. While they’re useful tools, they’re less than ideal for blind or partially sighted users, however.

With that in mind, one blind Redditor recently announced that they were posting a $1,000 bounty for any developer who could create a jailbreak tweak capable of not only keeping track of RSS feeds, but also getting Siri to read them out loud.

Apple is beefing up its Boston office, with an aim to expanding its Siri voice recognition team. Documents filed with local authorities show that the company has leased around 11,500 square feet of office space on the 13th floor of One Broadway, an office tower owned by MIT and located on the outer perimeter of the university’s campus in Cambridge, MA.

The added space gives Apple room to bring in an extra 65 people to work on the project, although a local job search for the area doesn’t yet show anything.

Apple has been steadily growing its Siri team over the past few years — recruiting employees formerly from companies like AT&T Research, Microsoft, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, BBN Technologies and others for its speech team in Cambridge.

A lot has changed at Apple in the years since Steve Jobs died. While much of it is good (record-breaking iPhone sales, work on the new Apple campus, the stock-split leading to new share price highs), it’s unavoidable that one or two (or, indeed, 7) things would slip through the cracks, which Apple’s notoriously perfectionist late CEO would have hated.

The recent publishing of a patent for an iOS stylus — an accessory Jobs was vocal about opposing — got us thinking about other aspects of Apple, circa 2015, that likely would have rubbed the company’s late CEO the wrong way.

Here’s what we came up with.

I asked Siri to set a 6:30 a.m. alarm so I could get this article written before my morning spin class. And that got me wondering what other things the young woman on my iPhone 6 Plus could do to help me meet or exceed my plans to dominate in 2015.

After my wake-up alarm, I told Siri to “call me ‘Champ.'” What better way to get our relationship started than to establish a motivational nickname? I was going to go with “Tiger” or “Hero” or “Shnoogems,” but decided “Champ” was the least embarrassing if Siri shouted it out in public.

Worried that the cops might bust in your door any minute, or simply really paranoid? How cool would it be if you could initiate a self-destruction sequence for your Mac using only your voice, just like Captain Picard would use to destroy The Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation?

Well, awesomely, you can. And it’s pretty easy to do!

Microsoft has assaulted Siri with a wave of ads pitting the popular digital assistant against Windows Phone’s Cortana, and while Siri repeatedly gets topped in areas like traffic alerts and reminders, she’s got some secret rhyming skills Cortana can’t top.

To showcase Siri’s mad ability to flow like lava, hip-hop producer Skeewiff featured her skills on his latest track “Know How.” Turns out Siri had the busiest rhymes ever made by man after all, and she’s got some harsh words for Cortana and Google Now.

Check the rhymes below the break:

In Spike Jonze’s film Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” played by Scarlett Johansson. But falling in love with Siri doesn’t just happen in the movies. In The New York Times, there is a beautiful piece about a 10-year-old autistic boy named Gus whose best friend is Siri.

Three out of four drivers in America believe that using hands-free technology like Siri is a safer way to cruise the highway than fiddling with buttons and knobs, but a surprising study from AAA found that using Siri on the road is actually dangerously distracting.

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety tested the distraction levels of a number of hands-free solutions from auto-manufacturers that allow drivers to compose messages, change the radio, and navigate complex menus with voice commands, and found that trying to chat with Siri while driving is more distracting that composing a text.

Microsoft has been having quite a bit of fun with Siri in its new Windows Phone ads. Reminiscent in feel of Apple’s old “Mac vs. PC” ads, the Cortana vs. Siri ad campaign shows Microsoft’s digital assistant having fun at the expense of slow, dumb ol’ Siri.

Not afraid to whip a dead horse, Cortana is now back in two news Windows Phone ads, showing just how much more she can do on Microsoft’s new Windows Phone-powered Nokia Lumia 635 than Siri can do on the iPhone.

With iOS 8, iPhone and iPad owners for the first time ever can replace Apple’s default virtual keyboard with a third-party alternative.

Doing so — with keyboards made by SwiftKey, Swype, Fleksy and others — could vastly improve your touchscreen typing experience. Not only do some of these keyboards make typing easier, but they also boast innovative features, like the ability to type words using simple swipes instead of taps. Many of these keyboards are completely customizable, so you can set their size and color scheme to suit you.

If you haven’t already installed a third-party keyboard, you’re missing out on one of iOS 8’s best features. In this guide, first we’ll tell you about the best keyboards available from the App Store right now. We’ll also run through the features that make them unique, show you how you can customize them and make them work for you, and explain some important concepts, such as “Full Access.”

Apple’s most-anticipated — and likely most-eventful — product introduction since the iPad is set for later this morning. It will undoubtedly be Tim Cook’s biggest moment yet as Apple’s CEO, with the company reportedly ready to unveil new products from what has been described as its most exciting product pipeline in a quarter century.

Anticipation among the Apple faithful couldn’t be any higher. Endless speculation and massive expectations about finally laying eyes on the long-awaited iWatch got us thinking about other memorable announcements from Apple’s 37-year history.

While you wait for this morning’s 10 a.m. liveblog from Apple’s big event, relive some of Cupertino’s past glories. Here are our picks for the 10 biggest Apple announcements of all time.

Tucked away in an assuming building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a small Apple team has been working on the future of Siri.

And that team is growing. A new report reveals that Apple is leasing a big new office and hiring away from competitors. It’s obvious that Siri will only be getting smarter in the future.

Microsoft may enjoy bragging about the perceived superiority of its Windows Phone virtual assistant Cortana over Apple’s Siri, but the actress who voices Cortana apparently isn’t so convinced.

In a recent tweet, actress Jen Taylor (@jentaylortown) tweeted the message “Oh my geez Seattle is beautiful” via iOS, suggesting that while Microsoft may be helping bring in the paychecks, that money is going on Apple products.

As Apple knows full well, it’s lonely at the top!

As if the constant shots from Samsung weren’t enough, Microsoft has just unleashed a new ad pitting its Cortana virtual assistant against Apple’s Siri. The ad, for those who can’t view it, begins with Siri ‘singing’ “I feel pretty, oh so pretty” into a mirror, only for the HTC One M8 with Windows to turn up, apparently dazzling the iPhone 5s with its superior size.

Find My iPhone has been invaluable at recovering lost Apple devices, but if you’re anything like me, keeping track of where you parked the car amid a sea of concrete and sedans is even harder than remembering where you dropped your selfie machine.

Apple’s latest patent filings reveal it has been working to solve those lost car disasters with an ingenious system that could be included in the future iPhones to guide you back to your vehicle, and it doesn’t even need an LTE or GPS signal.

Apple’s mega deal with IBM could give it a death grip on the enterprise market, but according to a report from The Information, Google’s Android team has been deep in talks with HP on ways it can push Android deeper into enterprise itself.

Using Google Now’s voice-search powers, the Android unit and HP have been discussing the potential of creating a mobile search product nicknamed “Enterprise Siri,” that could access financial data, product inventory, and more to become the perfect Siri-like tool for enterprise customers.

A Florida man accused of killing his roommate allegedly asked Siri to help him find a hiding place for the body.

“I need to hide my roommate,” 20-year-old Pedro Bravo told Apple’s virtual assistant on the day Christian Aguilar was kidnapped and strangled in September 2012.

In some ways Siri today is a little bit like the Macintosh circa 1984: everyone realizes the potential, but the technology is not yet as good as it could be.

With that in mind, several of the creators of Siri have set up a new startup outside of Apple called Viv Labs, aimed at creating a next gen virtual assistant capable of understanding sentences far more complex than the kind that you would normally feed to Siri.

I use OS X’s Dictation feature all the time while I’m working, but a new patent application published Thursday suggests that Apple’s looking to go much further when it comes to having users talk to their Macs.

The Intelligent Digital Assistant In A Virtual Environment application was filed February 4 this year, and describes a Mac-based Siri every bit as smart as its mobile iOS counterpart.

The patent application depicts a future OS X dock featuring an icon for Siri, which could be available to use for dictation or commands from inside various different programs.

While everyone’s focused on which virtual assistant can provide the best automated response, the company behind storage solution iDrive has come up with a different idea: Why not hand the job over to humans?

Asking if users are “tired of trying to explain to a computer program what [they’re] searching for,” or are “sick of getting answers that have nothing to do with what [they] need” OOLOO is a free-to-download iOS app, which connects you to real people 24/7, able to give you the kind of personalized answer that you’re unlikely to get from a tool like Siri.

Apple may be going harder than ever, while Microsoft is having to lay off 18,000 of its employees, but the Redmond, WA company is still intent on bragging about its “superiority” over Apple.

Taking a page out of the Samsung book of advertising-by-dissing-your-enemies, Microsoft has unleashed a new ad comparing its new Cortana virtual assistant with Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. And, wouldn’t you know it, in Microsoft’s version of events, Cortana blows Siri out the water.

Quite the surprise, huh?

Long-time rivals Apple and IBM partnered up this week to work together on enterprise software, but what does this mean for Siri? If Apple’s trusty voice assistant gets together with IBM’s extremely intelligent A.I. Watson, it could be a beautiful “relationship.”

Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup to hear all the latest news and rumors about this potential Apple-IBM hookup, possible trouble in the iPhone 6 sapphire glass pipeline, a toaster that burns your selfies into bread and the rest of the week’s biggest stories.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

IBM and Apple’s new enterprise partnership is already being called one of the “most important and powerful tech partnerships ever.”

But outside of selling more iPads, iPhones and Macs in business, what else could Apple get out of the deal, which was announced Tuesday? According to a new report, Watson — IBM’s Jeopardy-winning A.I. capable of understanding natural language.

A Beijing court has ruled against Apple, upholding the validity of a patent for a “type of instant messaging chat bot system” held by a Chinese company.

Zhizhen Internet Technology sued Apple back in 2012, claiming that virtual assistant Siri was infringing on the Chinese company’s patented idea for a so-called Xiaoi Bot. The Chinese bot was patented in 2004 — two years before the first Siri-related patent filing was made.

Tuesday’s Beijing court ruling paves the way for Zhizhen to continue its case against Apple for intellectual property infringement. Apple’s defense? That it never heard of Zhizhen’s technology prior to creating Siri.