Ecobee introduced two new smart thermostats on Tuesday. Photo: Ecobee
Smart home accessory specialist Ecobee unveiled two new smart thermostats Tuesday. Smart Thermostat Premium and Smart Thermostat Enhanced offer larger displays than before, a redesigned interface, HomeKit integration and more.
Apple's love letter to developers this year was great. Photo: Apple
Apple’s WWDC 2019 keynote was so action-packed that we’re still trying to process all the amazing new software and hardware that was shown off on stage.
Luckily, Apple already published the fantastic videos it made for the keynote so we can relive the greatness.
Check out all five videos and the new TV show trailer right here:
Apple engineers are preparing for the day Siri can reliably recognize voices. They’re working on how this digital assistant will respond to requests from multiple users.
This issue became important with the release of Apple’s HomePod earlier this year, as smartspeaker are used in shared spaces.
Apple released iOS 6.1 beta 3 to registered developers yesterday, but unless your iOS device’s unique identification number (UDID) is registered with Apple’s developer program, you can’t install it. But don’t worry, we can tell you everything that’s new in this version, including some changes to iCloud setup and Passbook sample cards, new mobile-cellular data options, and more.
Record, transcribe, send text on your older iPhone
Voice Dication, or Voice Dictation – Voice To SMS, Email, Facebook, Twitter And Other Apps to give it its full name, is a voice control app from Europe, designed to offer something vaguely Siri-like to those of us still stuck in the Dark Ages on our pre-4S iPhones.
Does it work? Well yes, actually it does. Better than expected.
We’ve seen plenty of jailbreak tweaks for enhancing Siri, but a new one called MyAssistant offers more features than any of its predecessors. Developed by Andrea Oliva and Saltb0x, MyAssistant is available for $0.99 in Cydia. You will need a jailbroken iPhone 4S or Siri-hacked iOS device to run MyAssistant.
With this new tweak you can tell your iPhone to reboot, lock, take a picture, get lyrics for a song, give you its battery percentage, and more. You can also customize the look of the Siri UI and create custom conversations with Apple’s digital assistant.
Last week we told you about Evi, an iPhone app that challenges Apple’s own Siri voice control technology. Powered by the same Nuance backend, Evi and Siri offer similar voice control/assistant features. The main difference between the two is that Evi is available on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, while Siri is only available natively for iPhone 4S owners.
Another App Store app has come to our attention, and its name is vokul. As the first and only 100% handsfree voice control app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, vokul allows users to dictate text messages, make calls, and play music without ever having to lift a finger.
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.