Siri - page 42

By now, every iPhone 4S user has to know about the raise to speak feature that activates Siri. You simply raise your iPhone 4S to your ear, wait for the two tones and start talking. Ask Siri a silly or serious question and it usually has an answer for you. Sometime it isn’t what you would expect.

Although it is fun to ask Siri questions, you can also use Siri for dictation purposes. You can activate dictation by pressing the microphone button on the iOS pop-up keyboard. But did you know there is another way to start dictation?

Still having battery life issues on your iPhone 4S under iOS 5.0.1? We’ve already proven the issue is a software problem, not a hardware problem, which means Apple should be able to fix the iPhone 4S’s electric arterial spray… but when?

Real soon, as it happens. In fact, one Apple software engineer says the iOS 5.0.2 update is coming next week. In addition, Apple’s working on its first big point release of iOS 5, which will bring new extensions and abilities to Siri!

Sony CEO Howard Stringer recently revealed the company’s intentions to launch a revolutionary new television before Apple, and according to The Wall Street Journal, it will be a web-based alternative to the traditional set that will allow users to avoid the cable companies.

We’ve seen a number of parodies that poke fun at Apple’s new intelligent assistant, but this one has to be my favorite. It’s a skit from CollegeHumor that mocks Apple’s latest Siri adverts by placing the feature in between husband and wife while they fight, and it’s hilarious.

Great spot by 9to5Mac: Amazon just dropped the price of the Apple TV by $10 to just $89.99; they’ve also rechristened it the ‘2010’ model.

Could Amazon know something the rest of us poor suckers don’t? Is an updated 2011 Apple TV incoming in time for Black Friday? If so, don’t expect much besides a bump to an A5 chip: if Apple were to, say, bring Siri to the Apple TV, they’d definitely make a big fuss over it in an event.

Oh, wow. The engineers over at app developing firm Applidium say they’ve cracked Siri’s security protocol wide open. In fact, using their method, they say that any app and any device can now use Siri in theory. In reality, though? There are a few obstacles remaining.

Remember Project Black Mirror, those hackers who claimed to have hooked up an some EEG suction cups, an Arduino and a MacBook Pro to an iPhone 4S and got Siri to read their minds? Lying bastards, the lot of them. And shame on us, we fell for it, at least in part.

Since the announcement of Siri with the iPhone 4S, countless OS X users have been wondering if Siri will eventually makes it’s way to the Mac. Well, you may not know it, but OS X actually includes a Speech Recognition system called Speakable Items, which is very similar to Siri in many ways. In this video, I’ll show you how to set it up, as well as how to tweak Speakable Items to your liking.

One of the biggest missing features from Apple’s Siri technology is integration with third-party apps. Apple launched Siri on the iPhone 4S with Wolfram Alpha and Yelp integration, but other developers have been unable to fully integrate their apps with Siri to create a compelling, voice-controlled experience.

Apple hasn’t given a confirmation that it will eventually open up Siri to third-party apps, but that hasn’t kept several apps from offering workarounds for Siri integration. What about the apps that were meant for Siri? We’ve collected 10 apps that we want to see integrated with Siri in the near future.

No matter how hard you concentrate and how far you extend your pineal gland, Siri can only understand what you say to it, not read your mind? But what if it could?

That question is no longer a hypothetical. The guys behind Project Black Mirror have just figured out a way to imbue Siri with telepathic abilities… kind of.

Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson he had “finally cracked” the television set, sparking more rumors his team in Cupertino are on the cusp of launching a revolutionary new television that will change home entertainment forever.

Apple won’t be the first to attempt this, however. Sony’s CEO Sir Howard Stringer says he is competing against Steve Jobs to change the traditional television set.

Since the unveiling of its iPhone 4S back in October, Apple has received heaps of praise for one of its new features in particular: Siri. The digital assistant is by far the most impressive voice recognition service built into a mobile device, and it seems everyone has been blown away by it.

What many of you may not know, however, is that Siri is one of the few Apple products that wasn’t created by the team in Cupertino. Instead, Siri was created by Dag Kittlaus, a 34-year-old man from Norway, and it has made him a multimillionaire.

Want Siri-like abilities on your Mac? Nuance has just launched their latest Dragon product onto the Mac App Store. Called Dragon Express, the $49 app brings Nuance speech recognition to your menu bar… the same powerful engine Siri uses to crunch your voice!

Apple doesn’t really like it when its employees speak to the press. Like, at all. So it’s interesting to see a British voice actor who provided the male voice For Siri — arguably the voice of Apple these days — openly speaking to journalists about how he came to speak for every iPhone 4S on Earth, especially considering Cupertino tried to muzzle him.

On the iPhone 4S, you can trigger Siri in one of two ways. You can either long press the home button, or you can turn on the “Raise to Speak” option under System Preferences and trigger Siri just by lifting your 4S towards your face.

That might not seem like a big deal, but that little feature led to Apple redesigning the way the iPhone’s IR proximity sensor works in the iPhone 4S.

Although the iPhone 4S might be dismissed as nothing but a spec bump phone, it does have one distinctive advantage over every other smartphone out there: Siri. Anyone who wants to compete with the iPhone 4S (and, presumably, the future iPad 3) will have to come up with their own answer to Siri, or be lost.

Well, what do you know. The hunt by Apple’s competition to find small voice recognition startups and absorb them has already begun with the revelation that Amazon has already picked up a company in the hopes of launching their own would-be Siri-like speech recognition service.

Siri is undoubtedly one of the biggest selling points for Apple’s new iPhone 4S, so it’s understandable every iOS user wants to see it on their older devices. But despite a report that claimed the Cupertino company is working on Siri for the iPhone 4, it has confirmed it currently has no plans to bring Siri to older devices.

If you’ve ever wanted to use Siri on your Mac, we’ve got the next best thing: how about using Siri on your iPhone 4S to pass along commands to your OS X desktop, launching apps just by giving your command out loud? Now you can, thanks to the latest update to the popular iTeleport VNC app.

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Famed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich has released a video of Siri running on the iPhone 3GS. Petrich is most known in the jailbreak community for his Activator extension that brings customized gestures for specific apps and tweaks in iOS.

In the above video, Petrich is demonstrating Siri on an iPhone 3GS. He has also mentioned that he is working on Activator integration with Siri.

Google’s former CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt told U.S. Senators Apple’s voice-recognition system is an “interesting development,” suggesting the iPhone 4S feature posed a “competitive threat” to its search business. Schmidt’s written comments come as a new survey finds Siri drastically reduces the number of Google searches, many times to none.

Despite the fact that Siri’s guts are in a billion dollar data facility in North Carolina somewhere, the iPhone 4S can actually be used to voice control an old Mac 512K.

Hackers have been hard at work attempting to port Apple’s new Siri assistant to older devices, but according to one report, their efforts may be wasted, because Apple is doing the same thing. The Cupertino company has reportedly issued a “special build” of iOS 5 to its staff, which introduces Siri to the iPhone 4 for testing.

No, it’s not just you: Siri is down for users around the country, hard, with no ETA or fix in sight.

Users who try to access Siri get this response: “Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network.”

Of course, Siri’s labeled a beta product, and it’s likely Apple is already working on this problem. We’ll tell you more once we know what the hey’s going on ourselves.

Siri’s a smart little moppet, but she can’t do everything for you. You can’t ask her to find you a picture of a dog from Google Images, or see if the guy you have a blind date with that night is a registered sex offender, or really do anything that Siri and Wolfram Alpha aren’t already programmed to do.

The good news is that Siri hacker chpwn has teamed up with GitHub hacker Aman Gupta to figure out how to add custom Siri commands. The bad news is it’s quite complicated, and there’s no way to do it right now for yourself.

Siri is a tremendous addition to Apple’s latest iPhone. But if you’ve already had the pleasure of making it your own virtual assistant, you may have noticed that without a data connection, Siri goes quiet. That’s because the feature connects to Apple’s servers every time you make a request in order to retrieve your answers, or perform the task you have requested.

If you’re a regular Siri user, then, you may be worried about the dent it’s making in your monthly data allowance. But there’s no need to worry, because it’s hardly anything.