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]
Apple’s new Siri assistant has really revolutionized the way in which we interact with mobile devices using our voice. It’s no wonder, then, that rivals are scrambling to introduce their own alternatives. Google already has one for Android, according to some reports, called Majel, and it’ll debut during the first quarter of 2012.
Memories of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs are still pouring in, the latest from Stephen Wolfram, the heart and brain of Siri. Wolfram told British interviewers Jobs “will always be a remarkable inspiration.” The former CEO laid the foundation of Apple’s future growth through “great tenacity and dramatic ultimate growth,” said Wolfram.
Warner Bros. issued an update to its terrific Scribblenauts Remix game for iOS yesterday, which introduces voice-controlled gameplay to the iPhone 4S with a feature called “Scibblespeak.” Much like Siri, the device’s built-in digital assistant, Scribblespeak allows you to create objects like a “zombified cheerleader” using nothing but your voice
How do you know you’re reading a report from a bug-eyed, sensationalist quack? When they take the newest and hottest trend and then say, “It’s almost as bad as this other popular trend amongst godless teenagers today!”
Here’s a good case study. Over at Fox News, a psychiatrist is claiming that Siri is just as damaging psychologically to kids as “violent video games!” WHAT?!?! Heaven forfend!
We’ve been anticipating Apple’s revolutionary new television set, dubbed the “iTV,” since Steve Jobs revealed he had “finally cracked” the TV to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. What we’re most excited about is its rumored Siri integration, but you don’t need to wait until Apple’s set is launched to get a Siri-controlled TV — it’s already here.
Apple has posted two new job listings for Siri UI engineers. The positions mainly focus on improving Siri’s on-screen conversation view, but there also some hints in the job description that suggest Apple is looking to do more with its voice assistant’s API.
Say hello to Voice Actions. She’ll say hello right back.
Voice Actions is a basic Siri alternative, available right now in the iOS App Store.
Following its debut on the iPhone 4S back in October, it seems every iOS user wants to get their hands on Siri. A number of developers have attempted to port the feature to older devices, but because it needs to talk to Apple’s servers to function properly, they’ve had little success. Until now!
A fully functional (and possibly illegal) version of Siri has made its way to the jailbroken iPhone 4 via Cydia.
This week, a lot was made in the news about Siri’s supposed pro-life leanings. Essentially, a bunch of people got upset because Siri couldn’t find a local abortion clinic, even though abortion clinics don’t actually call themselves that. Apple denied that Siri had any pro-life leanings whatsoever, saying instead the service was in “beta.”
So what really happened? Well, Apple just learned its first lesson about search: you’re held responsible when the information people are expecting to see doesn’t show up in a search query, even if that information is only tangentially related to the actual words in the query. It’s a headache Google’s been dealing with for almost a decade.
It’s not just Robin Williams making fun of Siri on national TV these days. Wry faux-conservative Stephen Colbert picked up his iPhone 4S the other day to address the recent controversy over Siri’s inability to find a single abortion clinic in New York, which Colbert describes as such an impossibility (“There’s one at the top of the Empire State Building”) that he summarily declares Siri to be a pro-life, racist arch-conservative, “like Laura Ingraham, except less robotic.” But who can blame her? As Colbert points out, it’s “only a matter of time before she loses her job to the Mexican yoPhoñe.”
Very funny. If you like Colbert, check it out.
Robin Williams popped up on the Ellen DeGeneres show the other day to talk about “the new future” that Siri offers, and as he is wont to do, he used it as an opportunity to break out an outrageous impression of Siri as a stereotypical, cheese-sniffing Frenchman, dripping with contempt for the American bourgeoise.
[via Techcrunch]