The days of laboriously converting an iPhone or iPad application to run on a Mac are almost over. Soon, preparing an iOS app to run on macOS will reportedly be as simple as the developer checking a checkbox.
This is part of a trove of good news for developers — and users — leaking out today.
One of Google’s top AI experts has left the company to join Apple’s special projects group.
Ian Goodfellow, who created an AI approach called general adversarial networks (GANs), was hired by Apple as a director of machine learning, adding another prominent Google AI expert to its growing team.
Apple bought a small startup that created an app that used machine learning to auotomically find news articles users would be interested in.
The acquisition of Laserlike is expected to bolster Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts.
Apple has quietly updated the female British voice for Siri. The improvements can be heard today on HomePod and iOS devices.
The update comes just a few weeks after Apple updated the male British voice. It is believed the company could be working on improvements for many of Siri’s international voices.
Corporation ISO very patient person to listen to endless complaints about its digital assistant. No phonies.
Apple really did post a job opening for someone to monitor what people are saying about Siri, with an eye to turning complaints into improvements to this beleaguered voice-driven assistant.
Samsung put Apple and the rest of the tech industry on notice today during its massive Unpacked event.
During the biggest tech event of 2019 so far, Samsung unveiled a slew of new smartphones, wearables, earbuds and more. Even though Samsung has a rep for copying Apple — and there was certainly a lot of that at Unpacked — the company is setting the tone for the rest of the industry. Samsung even leapfrogged Apple’s products in some ways.
Here are six things Apple should take note of.
Apple’s latest acquisition could give Siri a better chance at competing against Amazon’s popular voice-power assistant, Alexa.
Pullstring, a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in helping developers design, prototype and deploy voice apps has reportedly been purchased by Apple. The company’s platform helps create voice apps for Alexa and Google Assistant, and will likely help Apple make more tools for Siri.
Apple is starting off February by serving up a fresh new beta for developers with the release of iOS 12.2 beta 2.
The new beta comes just over a week after Apple seeded the first build of iOS 12.2. That update brought Apple News support to testers in Canada, as well as new Downtime feature that lets you schedules periodically limit the number of apps you can access.
Amidst a seemingly never-ending barrage of criticism, Siri is once again looking for a new team leader. After reports of infighting and disagreements about how to advance Siri last year, the internal development team is without direct leadership … again. This time, though, the move was self-inflicted and strategic.
The iPad infamously still lacks a built-in weather app. There are plenty of ways around this — you can ask Siri, you can use the Maps app to see the weather anywhere, or you can wait for your iPhone to give you a lock-screen forecast every morning.
Today we add a new method. We’ll make a quick shortcut that gets the weather at your current location, and displays it as a notification.
HomePod has a feature that is only available in China and could prove popular with busy parents and the kid who just wants to hear a story.
Apple’s version of a smart speaker made its debut in China and Hong Kong on Jan. 18 with the ability to command “Siri, tell me a story.”
Do you have a snippet of a song in your head, and it’s driving you crazy? Did you forget to Shazam it when you heard it playing in that hipster boutique vegan-boots-and-artisanal-ramen store? Then you need Apple Music’s search by lyrics feature, which lets you find a song based on a few vaguely remembered snatches of verse.
Sonos is about to add a new weapon to its smart speakers that will help make it even more competitive against Apple’s HomePod.
The company revealed today that it plans to bring Google Assistant to its smart speakers later this year. Beta testing for the new feature has already begun, allowing Google’s Siri-competitor to be the main voice input on some Sonos speaker models.
The female broadcaster and voice artist whose voice is used for the Hebrew version of Siri is reportedly suing Apple. Galit Gura-Eini, who has also provided the local voice for Waze, claims that Apple used her voice without permission.
Her lawsuit also claims that people have used the Siri voice to make her voice say various sexual, racist, or violent things.
A Baltimore-based rapper named HAZMATCAZ has taken the internet by storm. No, it’s not her ability to spit sick bars, but rather her astonishingly on-point Siri impression.
Check it out below.
Apple may have been late to the smart speaker game but its HomePod is showing signs it could one day outperform them all.
But only if Apple gives Siri the power.
In Loup Ventures annual smart speaker comparisons, Google Assistant understood all 800 questions and answered nearly 88 percent of them correctly. In its first Loup Ventures test, the HomePod with Siri at the helm misunderstood just three questions and managed to answer correctly nearly 75 percent of its queries.
“Hey Siri, 30-minute timer!” you shout across the kitchen, elbows deep in turkey gizzards. Only Siri isn’t interested. It’s already running that one-hour timer for the roast potatoes. Why would anybody want to run multiple timers at the same time? Silly human.
Thankfully, Shortcuts is here to save your bacon (and your Brussel’s sprouts, sage-and-onion stuffing, and so on). If you’re feeling fancy, you could even set this up to use with Siri, but today we’ll keep it simple. So, no matter how complex your Christmas Day cooking arrangement, Shortcuts will let you know when your goose is cooked.
Apple has promoted John Giannandrea to its executive team as senior vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
Giannandrea, who joined Apple back in April of this year after eight years at Google, is responsible for Siri and the Core ML framework. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company is “fortune to have John … driving our efforts in this critical area.”
A 4-year-old boy in England used Siri to call for help after his pregnant mom collapsed, according to reports.
Beau Austin, who reportedly loved talking to digital assistants on devices, called out to Siri on his mother’s iPhone to dial 999. He then told the operator “my mummy’s sick,” adding they were alone.
Apple’s HomePod speaker is finally set to launch in the second-most important market for the iPhone maker.
The Chinese version of Apple’s website was updated today announcing that the HomePod will finally land in Greater China during early 2019.
Apple pulled back the curtain on some of the most complicated features of its HomePod smart speaker this morning with a new blog post that details the machine learning tech that goes into its ‘Hey Siri’ detection.
One of the biggest challenges with making a smart speaker is not only figuring out what to listen for but also what sounds to discard in the process. Apple’s engineers have come up with a number of interesting methods to make Siri work even when you’re blasting tunes our of the HomePod’s speakers.
Today we’re going to make a Siri Shortcut that takes any text, converts it into English, and copies it to the clipboard. Never again will you have to struggle with a foreign menu on a web page, or a snippet of text from a non-English news site.
There are a few ways to translate text and websites on iOS, but this shortcut has two big advantages: It’s really, really fast, and it automatically copies the result to the clipboard. If you ever used the otherwise-excellent Microsoft Translate share extension, you will already be sick of having to manually select the result in a tiny window, and then use the share sheet again just to copy it.
How’s that new iPad Pro? I love mine, apart from the short USB-C cable that won’t stretch to my desk while I’m working. You’ve probably been scouring the web for tips and trick to get more out of your new beast. Well, you’re in luck, because we’ve been doing the same, and gathered all the 2018 iPad Pro tips together here, in one place.
If you’ve upgraded to iOS 12.1 already, you might want to be careful about where you leave your iPhone. It turns out that a new lock screen flaw lets anyone access your contacts without your passcode. The video below shows you how it’s exploited.
Amidst the flurry of iPad and Mac news yesterday, Apple also released the latest version of Shortcuts, the super-cool iOS automation app. The big news is the addition of seven new actions for checking the weather, setting timers and measurement conversions. Let’s take a look at Shortcuts 2.1.
