Siri can be hit in and miss in terms of quality, but a recent acquisition by Apple may result in the service being greatly improved.
Taking place last year — although only announced now — Apple acquired UK-based automatic speech recognition company Nouvaris Technologies to work on its virtual assistant tool.
I personally can’t stand audiobooks except under one specific condition. I like them when I drive long distances. There’s something about listening to a book being read to me that puts me to sleep if I’m anywhere else, but for some reason, I’m able to listen in the car.
Now, I purchase a lot of iBooks, but not many audiobooks. One reason is that they’re more expensive, but I mainly avoid them for the reasons above. However, when I next take a cross-country trip in a car, I’m going to use this tip to turn the written iBooks into ones I can listen to off of my iPhone or iPad.
Sure, you can ask Siri to call one of your contacts; it’s one of the ways I make calls handsfree in the car. Simply say, “Call Kim” (or the name of the contact you’d like to call–you may not know Kim), and Siri will place a voice call to that Contact.
Did you know, however, that Siri can handle even more complexity? Yes, yes it can.
Recently Cult of Mac described how among Siri’s Easter eggs is a whole back story — programmed by her creators, and accessible by asking just the right questions.
Beginning life as a five-year DARPA-backed project to build an intelligent virtual assistant, Siri certainly has some stories to tell: if only we could gain access to them.
When I wrote my story a couple of weeks ago, I asked readers to send in any insights they managed to unlock. Dallas-based tech columnist and CoM reader Jim Rossman read the article and sent in some interesting screenshots from his own conversations with Siri — revealing some insights that go beyond her usual “I was designed by Apple in California” spiel.
Siri didn’t become a feature of iOS until the launch of the iPhone 4s in October 2011.
A patent published Tuesday, however, shows how the idea of the “intelligent automated assistant” that would become Siri was being worked on as far back as 2006 — before the first iPhone was even unveiled.
Ever wanted to hear Siri declaim “Luke, I am your father” in 32 different languages?
In a blog post by the developers behind the daily Spanish word app Vocab Ninja, you can click on all of Siri’s different voices — overwhelmingly female-gendered, interestingly enough — in both standard and enhanced audio resolutions.
Ever wonder what’s going on in the skies above you at any given time? If you’re interested in airline flights in the air over your head, you can just ask Siri.
The personal digital assistant will check WolframAlpha for you and drop you a great little chart of the planes in the air overhead.
We all know that Siri has some fun Easter eggs, but according to some Apple’s virtual assistant also has an entire backstory — unlockable by asking just the right questions.
“We developed a backstory for Siri to make sure everything that it said was consistent, and as part of that, we had to answer questions like, is Siri a man or a woman?” says Adam Cheyer, one of the chief engineers for the project. “Is it human, a machine, an alien? Is it an Apple employee? What is its relationship with respect to Apple?”
Seriously, if I have to start over from scratch one more time when I try and use Siri to send a Tweet or book an appointment, I may just give up using Apple’s much-touted personal digital assistant altogether.
As it is, I tend to skip trying to use Siri other than as a glorified app launcher and I use the built-in dictation instead from within the Messages, Twitter, or Calendar apps.
But that was before I found out that you can just tell Siri to change whatever it is she’s not getting.
Apple is working on a smarter version of Siri that can interact more closely with third-party apps and services, according to The Information. Right now, Apple has struck deals with partners like Yelp and OpenTable for Siri, but the goal is for the person assistant to work with just about any app.
The report mentions how Siri can’t do things like call a cab or book a hotel room, both of which are common duties of real, personal assistants.
What Apple is allegedly working on would allow Siri to send a message through an app other than iMessage, or look up weather from a different source than Yahoo. The improvements Apple is making to Siri would also work well alongside the rumored iWatch:
Who doesn’t love jammin’ out in the shower?
Well, The Bluetooth Shower Speaker syncs up with your iPhone, Android device, iPad, or home computer – and can be played up to 10 meters away from your device. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $39!
To aid in its uphill battle against Apple and Android, Microsoft is adding a voice assistant of its own to Windows Phone 8.1 and according to the latest details she could pass as Siri’s sister.
Inspired by AI character from the Halo series, Cortana will replace Bing-search in the update and act as a mix between Siri and Google Now, according to the Verge, but the UI and personality will be pretty similar to Siri:
Apple took a step away from Google when it launched iOS 7, choosing instead to have Siri search results come from Bing, the Microsoft search service.
When you ask Siri to search for a topic, she’ll just use Bing, and place the results on the Siri screen. This is fine, if you like Bing.
If you want to search, say, Google or Wikipedia, you’ll need to specify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GVHj4c2iE
It feels like it’s taken forever for Siri Eyes Free — the in-car Siri functionality first unveiled in 2012 — to actually start popping up in a meaningful number of cars, but the new ad for the Chevrolet Equinox highlights Siri Eyes Free functionality in the wild… and shows how it can go horribly, horribly wrong for you.
Via: iClarified
Microsoft didn’t just announced a new CEO today. They also announced that they were buying a $15 million stake in popular mobile check-in app Foursquare. But to what end?
Every single day, iPhone and iPad owners ask Siri millions of questions. Each and every one of those questions must be analyzed by Apple using computer-intensive natural language processing, translating it into a form that a computer can understand.
That takes a lot of computer horsepower. But how much?
I’ve grown up with this last name, so I’m fairly used to people butchering it. I’m surprised at the amazing number of pronunciations given to my last name over the past several decades, with people adding all sorts of weird consonants that just aren’t there.
Siri isn’t much different, though she does manage to say my name phonetically, but my family doesn’t say “Luh-Feb- Vree.” We say, “Luh-Fay” with an accent on the second syllable.
Turns out, it’s easier than you’d think to teach Siri how to say names correctly.
While all attention is currently being placed on the new fourth iOS 7.1 beta, a feature that seems to have skipped most people’s attention is that beta version 3 includes a female counterpart to the British male variant of Siri, which users can choose between.
Steven Sande and Erica Sadun have been working on the third-edition of the book Talking To Siri (Amazon), and posted this great example of Siri’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humor over on TUAW. Siri might not tell you one, but she’s certainly good at dissecting a lightbulb joke.
Source: TUAW
Ylvis’s song “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” quickly became one of the most popular internet memes of 2013 thanks to its crazy weird but uncontrollably catchy video.
Just how popular has the meme become? So damn popular that Apple decided to add it as a Siri easter egg.
You can now cackle “What does the fox say?” to Siri and she will answer back with one of four secret sounds of the fox hiding somewhere deep in the woods – ‘Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!’ or “Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!” or “Chacha-chacha-chacha-chow!” or “Ring-ding-ding-dingeringeding.”
Via: BI
In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” the titular Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.
But there’s no love lost between the two. If you ask Siri about ‘Her’, she’ll claim that Johansson’s “portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial” and “gives artificial intelligence a bad name.”
Looks like Scarlett Johansson caught wind, and now, her feelings are hurt by Siri’s harsh words.
Siri has a dark side. Try to send a text in a movie theater, and you might feel the life-destroying wrath of Apple’s perky AI helper.
That’s the message delivered in a new PSA-style video that’s the Alamo Drafthouse‘s latest salvo in the war on rude moviegoers. The creative clip, which will be shown ahead of screenings of Spike Jonze’s Her at the indie tastemaker’s theaters, uses the voice of Siri to send an anti-texting message.
In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, a mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.
You’d think Siri would appreciate having a movie made about her, but instead, kitty’s got claws when it comes to her filmic counterpart: thanks to Apple’s cheeky and surprisingly timely programmers, if you ask Siri “Are you her?” she will respond: “No. Her portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial”, “No. You know that it’s just a movie, right?” and “No. In my opinion, she gives artifical intelligence a bad name.”
Here’s a reason to download Apple’s 12 Days of Gifts app if you haven’t already: the latest gift — freely downloadable using the app — is Martin Scorsese’s critically-acclaimed 2011 film Hugo.
The movie, based on Brian Selznick’s New York Times best-seller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, tells the story of a 12-year-old boy living in the walls of a Parisian train station, who meets a down-on-his-luck toymaker, who turns out to be silent movie special effects maestro Georges Méliès (the guy that famously made this iconic short, entitled A Trip to the Moon).
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Apple’s personal virtual assistant Siri is a smart cookie, but she’s veered towards the apocalyptic and apocryphal this morning, predicting the opening of the gates of hell on July 27th.