Siri - page 44

We thought we’d put this Apple television business to rest as a pipe-dream, but then Steve Jobs’s biography came out, where he claimed he had finally “cracked” the TV problem. Now the rumor mill has started itself up again with renewed vigor, and the latest report from Nick Bilton over at The New York Times: his sources tell him that Jobs thought that the “industry was totally broken” a real Apple-branded television set “isn’t a matter of if, but when,” a “guaranteed product.”

Fancy a break from the constant tintinnabulation of your iPhone? Here’s a great Siri tip spotted by the guys over at OS X Daily: just press down the hold button and tell Siri to “turn off all alarms.”

Once you’ve been able to catch your breath, turning your alarms all on again is as easy as saying “turn on all alarms.”

One thing that many seem to forget about Apple’s new voice recognition assistant is that it’s still in beta. Although Siri is available to iPhone 4S users in Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, you can’t expect a seamless experience.

While many have still been impressed with the feature since its release, others are too quick to criticize it. A report from British tabloid The Daily Mail today brands Siri a frustration that has left Scottish users “bamboozled” because it cannot understand their accent.

A few weeks ago, we posted the video below to show how Apple saw Siri and the iPad coming back in 1987. We didn’t tell the story behind the video though, which is equally fascinating.

Carbon weave has got to be the Miracle Whip of gadgets — it makes anything taste better. We reviewed Sound ID’s 510 Bluetooth headset in a BT headset head-to-head (try saying that fast) a few months back; and while it sounded great and was pretty much our pick of the week, it wasn’t the coolest looking kid on the block — and you couldn’t order it to do stuff, like you could some other headsets. Sound ID’s new Six fixes all that, and adds a trick for Siri too.

Friends sometimes tell me I have a hollow leg, but they don’t really mean it: they just mean that my rampant alcoholism is frequently imperceptible. If it were literally true that I had a hollow leg, I’d probably be tempted to do something crazy with it… like, say, run an Apple Dock Connector up through it and turn my upper calf into an easily accessible iPhone dock.

That’s why I’m so green with envy reading this Telegraph story about Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm who modified his prosthetic to be a smartphone dock. The only problem? He crammed a Nokia in there, not an iPhone!

In Apple’s own soothing Siri commercial, dozens of beautiful people living in utopian cityscapes and country vistas effortlessly interact with their iPhone 4Ses as if they were confabbing with the most soliciting of manservants.

In real life, though, things aren’t quite so pretty, as TBS’s Conan O’Brien is quick to point out in this hysterical parody video in which Apple’s original ad is intercut with two disheveled grossies asking Siri to direct them towards the fastest way to Diarrheatown, or compute the circumference of their manhoods.

It is, I’m sorry to say, a perhaps accurate depiction of at least my iPhone 4S post-launch Saturday night.

Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus has reportedly left Apple just days after his sophisticated voice-recognition technology made its debut on the iPhone 4S. It was an ‘amicable’ departure, according to sources, that will allow Kittlaus to focus on “new entrepreneurial ideas.”

Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president of mobile, doesn’t particularly care for Siri and the idea that the iPhone 4S could be your personal assistant. Rubin says it’s just a little weird for people to be talking to their phone. Those words he’s going to eat.

Not many of us expected Apple to introduce LTE or 4G capabilities to its fifth-generation iPhone, but according to one Swedish carrier, the Cupertino company would be killing its iPhone 5 if it doesn’t adopt LTE technology by then.

Siri is one of the iPhone 4S’ biggest selling points, and I think anyone who’s had chance to try out the feature would agree that’s it’s pretty exceptional. For the time being, it’s exclusive to Apple’s latest iPhone, but one hacker claims to have it running on any device running iOS 5, and says a jailbroken device is not necessary.

Let’s just say it: any smartphone that recognizes my lineage by calling me a queen is right as rain in my book. (Namely because it saves those tiring discussions about “You don’t know who you’re dealing with!” etc.)

The learning curve with Apple’s new iPhone 4S voice activated personal assistant Siri may or may not be steep – depending on your point of view – but a  Twitter feed launched Oct. 15 compiling the more unusual responses is exceedingly droll. 

The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones wanted to find out which smartphone was the best listener, so he conducted a quick test of his own.

He spoke the same text into a Siri-equipped iPhone 4S and a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and compared the transcribed results.

One of the most obvious features Siri lacks on the iPhone 4S is social network integration. Although Twitter is integrated into iOS 5, you still can’t tweet or update your Facebook account from Siri.

There’s actually an easy workaround to update Twitter and Facebook with Siri on your iPhone 4S.

I’ve been using the iPhone 4S for a whole weekend now, and I have to say, this device is a magnificent beast. That dual-core A5 processor makes everything super speedy and incredibly seamless, while the 8-megapixel camera takes terrific photos, and the Siri assistant — although in the U.K. — is just plain awesome.

Externally, however, the iPhone 4S is just as fragile as its predecessor, and nowhere near as robust as its biggest rival, the Samsung Galaxy S II.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-OnZCywaII

The same developer that originally ported Siri to the iPhone 4 has created another video showing more progress. Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been working to port Apple’s new Siri technology to older iOS devices.

In the first video, Siri was unresponsive and sluggish on the iPhone 4, mainly due to the fact that the phone’s GPU was disabled. Now the Siri port has been improved to run smoother and more fluidly on the iPhone 4.

Siri is the intelligent assistant that comes with the iPhone 4S. You simply hold the iPhone’s Home button and speak your question or command — Siri does the rest.

While the obvious benefit of Siri is the handsfree aspect of voice technology, you can actually edit your Siri conversations the good old fashioned way with your keyboard.

We have no doubts at Cult of Mac that iPhone 4S sales this week-end are going to be a blow out and the first thing people will probably try to do after obtaining their iPhone 4S is to converse with Siri.  Well it looks like this morning with way too many people to talk to Siri has gone offline or maybe its just out on a coffee break.

I had a late day yesterday and I’m only now getting around to playing around with and testing Siri. I think the rest of you might have worn it out since it isn’t as snappy as it was yesterday when I tried  a few preliminary requests.

According to a report Steven Troughton-Smith has made progress on porting the Siri voice assistant to the iPhone 4. The resulting ported version of Siri isn’t ready for prime time so I wouldn’t get to excited just yet and return that iPhone 4S you bought yesterday.

One of the most appealing things about Apple’s new iPhone 4S, in addition to that dual-core A5 processor and 8-megapixel camera, is the incredibly impressive Siri assistant. It makes its debut on the new iPhone, and isn’t available on any other device right now. In Apple’s promotional videos, Siri is incredibly impressive and it’s amazed us all, but if you’re outside the United States, Siri may be a disappointment to you.

Here’s something that I won’t know is real or not until I receive my iPhone 4S tomorrow, but never the less it’s funny and entertaining at the same time. So without further adieu its Shit That Siri Says from the website with the same name more after the break.

We’ve seen the first rash of iPhone 4 reviews coming in, and they all agree on one thing: Siri is very impressive.

It works because it does several things all at once. It understands what you’re saying, irrespective of your accent, and without a lot of initial training. And it understands what you mean, because it has the built-in smarts to know that if you say “Tell my wife I’m running late,” you mean “Send a text message to this particular contact with text that says I’m running late.”

But this is just the start for Siri (which Apple’s acknowledged by calling it a beta). The iPhone 4S is the first Apple device that supports it – it certainly won’t be the last. Where might Siri go next?

References in Apple’s iOS 5 software sparked speculation over the weekend that suggested an upcoming refresh to the Apple TV could introduce the company’s latest dual-core processor. While that would allow the device to playback content in 1080p, it could also pave the way for a Siri assistant on our TVs.

We’d have been more interested in this a couple of weeks ago, but the guys over at AppV managed to get their hands on a new iPhone 4S and have done a short video walkthrough of the device, demonstrating the Siri settings interface which allows you to turn voice control on and off, change your Language Settings, adjust Voice Feedback and enable Raise to Speak mode. That’s a new revelation: although Apple’s Siri promo videos hinted at it, this is the first time I recall an accelerometer controlled “Raise to Speak” mode confirmed.

There’s also an early benchmark of Mobile Safari, which proves that the iPhone 4S renders pages about twice as fast as the iPhone 4, which was already pretty much the fastest web browsing experience on the block. The ‘S’ in iPhone 4S does stand for speed, after all.

[via MacRumors]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTg00wIijNY

Fans of the popular Portal and Half-Life games from Valve will be familiar with GLaDOS, the malicious AI computer system.

As highlighted by The Loop, Filmmaker Jeff Heimbuch has created a parody mashup of Apple’s Siri intro video. GLaDOSiri will help you set reminders and complete tasks, but don’t expect a her to be nice about it.