Purple Siri is soo boring. Why not change it up a bit? If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone 4S, then you can take advantage of a fun tweak called Siri Mic Colors. Once installed for free in Cydia, this simple package spices up your iPhone’s digital assistant with some rainbow flair.
While the feature is currently still in beta, Apple is yet to extend Siri support to apps that aren’t already baked into the iOS operating system. But did you know that the company’s own Find My Friends app, which debuted alongside iOS 5 last summer, does include Siri support, allowing you to locate your pals using only your voice?
Here’s you to find your friends using Siri.
Since Apple launched Siri on the iPhone 4S back in October last year, hackers have been working their socks off to port the intelligent assistant to other iOS devices. But it seems all their hard work may have been wasted, because one guy claims he got Siri on his new iPod touch simply by restoring from an iPhone 4S backup.
Apple is expected to revolutionize television with a set of its own later this year, and while we’re all expecting the device to feature Siri, there’s very little else we know about it. But according to a relatively new Apple patent, credited to Steve Jobs, it may also feature digital video recording capabilities that allow you to save your favorite shows for viewing at a later date.
We’re only about two or three months away from the iPad 3 dropping and blowing our socks off. Right now, we can tell you a lot about what the iPad 3 will probably be like. It’ll feature Apple’s new, quad-core A6 CPU. It’ll feature a 2048 x 1536 resolution Retina Display. It may — but probably won’t — be the first iOS device to ship with LTE support.
But what about Siri, Apple’s amazing new voice control technology prominently featured in the iPhone 4S? Surely, that’s a lock for all future Apple devices starting with the iPad 3, right?
Well, hold on. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
Nuance, a speech recognition company that powers Apple’s Siri service, has launched a new voice-controlled platform for television sets called Dragon TV. The service allows you to navigate your way around different content by “speaking channel numbers, station names, show and movie names” using natural language.
It’s everything you’d expect a Siri-powered Apple TV to be.
Today’s iOS 5.1 beta 3 makes some interesting references to Siri’s Dictation feature. On both the iPod touch and iPad, a new Dictation text file has appeared under the keyboard settings window. This new document is not present in the same place on the iPhone 4S, suggesting that this reference does indeed foreshadow what’s to come.
The text file outlines iOS Dictation’s privacy details. While Siri Dictation is currently an iPhone 4S-only feature, it’s plausible to assume that Apple is working to bring the feature to other iOS devices.
The Consumer Electronics Show has officially kicked off here in Las Vegas, and if there’s one thing every Mac fan should go into CES knowing, it’s that the whole television industry is petrified of Apple entering it.
As CEA’s Chief Economist and Director of Research Shaun Dubrovik made clear in his introductory presentation on the trends they expect to see this year at CES 2012, the whole television industry is scrambling. They are all trying to anticipate just what the heck Apple is going to do when they unveil their long rumored television, the iTV.
What are TV makers betting that Apple has up its sleeves? A bezel-less, ultra high resolution TV that runs apps and is controlled by a mixture of gestures and voice control and effortlessly interact with tablets and smartphones.
No wonder they’re scared: no one is better positioned to roll out a next-gen television that does all of the above things than Apple.
If you’re a carrier scrambling for ways to make up dwindling voice and texting profits, Apple’s iPhone 4S is not just a product, but a dreamy pin-up, a new report on smartphone data usage finds. What’s more, Siri — the iPhone 4S’s hallmark feature — is a down-right wet dream.
It would seem that popular music streaming service Spotify is cooking something especially juicy in the voice department. Forbes is reporting that Spotify’s CEO has shown off a “hack” that involved telling the service’s iOS app to play some tunes.
Known developers Grant Paul (a.k.a ‘chpwn’) and Ryan Petrich have released a working Siri port for older, jailbroken iOS devices in Cydia. “Spire” will install Siri on older-generation iOS devices, including the original iPad.
Spire downloads Siri directly from Apple’s servers. The only catch is that you will need access to an iPhone 4S and your own proxy to get the port up and running.
Santa has come and gone on his sleigh, and Apple has profited along the way. A survey from Ace Metrix, a TV ad analysis firm, has revealed that Apple’s Santa Siri commercial beat out 34 other Santa-themed spots to win the crown of most effective ad for the 2011 holiday season.
Apple’s commercial, featuring Santa and the iPhone 4S’s Siri assistant, scored a 652 out of a possible 950 points in Ace Metrix’s survey, topping competitors like Pillsbury, Coca-Cola, and Nintendo.
2011 has been Apple’s most incredible year left. Heck, they’ve released more revolutionary products in this year alone than most companies manage in a generation. So we knew it would be difficult when we asked you to help us choose Apple’s best products of 2011. Now the results are in, and we’ve whittled the list down to just the finalists. Check out the finalists below, then help us choose just one of them that we’ll declare to be the best Apple product of 2011 in next week’s Cult of Mac Best Of 2011 awards.
The iPhone 4S is out for blood this holiday season.
We’ve seen a couple good hacks that allow you to use Siri and the iPhone 4S to control your Mac, but Vocal is the best and most feature-rich one we’ve seen yet, allowing you to use your iPhone 4S to control apps, perform searches, copy-and-paste text, control iTunes, lookup words and much, much more.
We’ve seen Siri do nearly everything imaginable, but did you know that Apple’s virtual assistant is also a musician? The Yamaha Disklavier can be controlled by Siri, as demonstrated in the above video.
Siri takes a song from your iPhone’s Music library and sends it through an Airport Express to then get analyzed and played perfectly by the piano. Hey, it’s a lot easier than learning the piano yourself, right?
The New York Times reports that Apple is “secretly” working on a number of wearable devices including a new “curved-glass iPod that would wrap around the wrist.” The devices will have Siri built-in allowing us to control them with our voice, and may even relay information back to our iPhones.
If you haven’t already seen Apple’s new iPhone 4S ad in which Santa uses Siri, then go and check it out — it’s really great. You may notice than when Santa checks his calendar, he has 3.7 billion appointments on Christmas Eve, four of which are with Whitney Kollar, Mark Sloan, Paula Cristalli, and David Young.
These aren’t just random names dreamt up by employees at Apple’s marketing firm — they are employees at Apple’s marketing firm.
The Wall Street Journal has shed light on Apple’s plans for entering the TV industry. According to the WSJ, Apple is planning to reinvent not only the television itself, but the way we consume media every day.
Apple has been working on its top-secret TV project for quite some time. While the project is still in its early stages, all signs point towards Apple destroying and rebuilding the traditional way we watch movies and TV shows. The company wants to implement a unified experience that extends to the living room.
Apple’s advertising runs the gamut from motivational to touching, pragmatic to inspiring. They don’t play the humor card very often, but this latest ad showing Santa using Siri on an iPhone to help him through his rounds is actually pretty funny and appropriate for the season.
Thanks Siri! Thanks Santa! And Happy Holidaze to all…
It’s always seemed like such a simple tweak, but SBSettings has turned out to be the jailbreak tweak I have the hardest time living without: a simple interface for turning on or off the most common iPhone or iPad settings with a single button press, opened by simply swiping your finger across your iOS’s status bar.
Now that Siri’s here, though, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to just tell your iPhone to do the things SBSettings does? Turn Bluetooth On or Off, for instance, or go into Airplane Mode.
Apple mysteriously left the ability to use Siri to toggle system preferences out of iOS 5, but the functionality’s reportedly on the way thanks to a new app called Toggles. The only problem? We’ll have to wait for an iPhone 4S jailbreak first.
Did you wait until the very last minute to do your Christmas shopping? Well, thanks to a swank new addition to Wolfram Alpha, Siri can now help you find the best deals going on electronics over at Best Buy.
Ah, wonderful. Imagine the comic opportunities that lie ahead now that Dilbert characters carry talking smartphones.
Somehow, you can tell this is probably just part of Dogbert’s masterplan for the company anyway.
Siri is by far the iPhone 4S’s most-desired feature, and many non-4S users have been clamoring for hackers to make the voice assistant available on older iOS devices. While Siri ports have been demoed to the public before, it’s been made clear that public distribution is not possibile at this time due to legal issues.
Apple has made a Siri port legally possible with today’s iOS 5.0.1 revision by offering wide-open access to system files that were previously encrypted.
Think you’re sick of Siri videos? Think again: here’s Siri rapping the Notorious B.I.G.’s song “Hypnotize” with an amazing amount of flow, thanks to a clever video made by Robert Boehnke for London’s Music Hack Day.
Now when can we get this feature natively, Apple? And better question yet: can Google’s Majel be programmed to rap some Tupac for a genuine East Coast vs. West Coast rapper showdown?
[via Gizmodo]