Siri

Would You Ever Name Your Child After a Gadget?

Because all the good names are already taken, it’s tempting for mothers to just pop out a kid, look around the room, and say I name thee Curtain Rod. But even that would be preferable to the actual rise in people naming their kids after technology. Apple has seen a banner moniker year (thanks in…

How Do Computers Understand Speech?

More and more, we can get computers to do things for us by talking to them. A computer can call your mother when you tell it to, find you a pizza place when you ask for one, or write out an email that you dictate. Sometimes the computer gets it wrong, but a lot of…

Who Is Eddy Cue? The Guy Who Fixes All of Apple’s Problems

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services and Ferrari board member, is Apple’s do everything, fix any problem man. According to WSJ, he’s the guy who’s in charge of fixing Apple Maps and Siri. https://gizmodo.com/apples-icloud-chief-jumps-on-the-board-of-ferrari-5958576 Because Scott Forstall is out at the company, Apple has tapped Cue to fix two of…

Apple Just Can’t Keep iCloud In the Air

Today, iTunes Match went down. Yesterday, it was iMessage and FaceTime. Since launching iCloud to the public on October 12th, 2011, Apple just hasn’t been able to keep its cloud-based services airborne. Sure, the most basic iCloud plan is free, but iTunes Match costs $25 a year. As a replacement for the MobileMe catastrophe, iCloud…

Seems movie ticket purchasing may be coming to Siri with iOS 6.1: a Fandango backend will help buy tickets. [9to5mac]

Google Voice Search Vs. Siri: Who’s the Best iPhone Assistant?

With Google’s release of its brand new search app for iOS, we decided to put Siri in the ring with Voice Search-now available on your iPhone-to see if she could defend her own turf. Overall performance on both sides was generally sound. There were some odd answers, like when I asked for information about the…

Siri’s deranged synopses of science fiction films prove that she’ll be no help when the Singularity hits

It has been said that Apple’s Siri is an important precursor to more advanced intelligent personal assistants. Eventually, it’s thought, we’ll be able to have actual conversations with these sorts of AI, and possibly even relationships. But as Laura June of The Verge has recently pointed out, Siri is not to be trusted — and…

What Siri Thinks of Your Favorite Movies

Siri sometimes says crazy things that don’t quite match up with what you’ve asked. But the Verge has discovered that she has some pretty strong opinions when it comes to movies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Siri has a lot to say about sci-fi, and seems to have a lot of admiration for the likes of Hal. She’s…

The New Apple: It Doesn’t Just Work

Some people willingly overpay for half-baked features in obscure gadgets. These are the early adopters of the world, and they know full well that the things they buy will not work perfectly. Hiccups and glitches are just part of the contract, the accepted trade-off for being first. Apple’s customers are not these people—iPhones are the…

Siri Is Serving Up Wacky Weather Results for Many Locations

Today is a breezy, beautiful fall day in New York City. But if you ask Siri about the weather here, she’ll tell you it’s 90 degrees. This is not the weather in New York City, but rather the weather in New York, Texas. Something’s up with Siri again. We’ve known for some time that Siri…

Apple Might Bring Siri Voice Control to Macs

Dictation on the Mac is pretty nice, for what it is, but Apple isn’t the first to pull that off. According to a new patent application though, it might be eyeing something more ambitious: full Siri control on the Mac. Here’s an excerpt from a revised application: The electronic device may process voice commands locally…

Apple Is Mixing Up Speech Recognition and Sound Processing in the iPhone 5

Audience, the company responsible for developing the EarSmart technology which power’s Siri, has announced that Apple is “unlikely” to use the system in the next-generation iPhone. https://gizmodo.com/why-siri-will-never-officially-appear-on-the-iphone-4-5882562 Audience actually helped Apple develop part of the A5 processor, so that it could include a digital signal processor to remove background noise and secondary voices, as well…

Siri’s Grandfather Is One Creepy Old Man

Even Apple’s Siri, arguably the cutting-edge of synthesized computer voices, sounds incredibly fake. To the point where you’d think that field of research has only been around for about 10 years. But shockingly it dates back to the 1930s—80+ years ago! But we’ve still come an incredibly long way in recreating human voice and speech,…

Does the Technology Make the Writer? I Hope Not

Over at The Atlantic, Robert Rosenberger has a fascinating and smart piece about technologies like Siri, which take voice dictation and turn it into text, and what kinds of effects they may have on how we write. As a writer who’s being thinking a lot about finding easier ways to write while I have my…

Martin Scorsese Likes Siri, Thinks She’s “Going Places”

The latest installment in Apple’s arsenal of celebrity Siri promos is here, featuring a very peppy Martin Scorsese headed downtown in a yellow NYC taxi. Marty makes the most of his time alone with his virtual assistant, switching around appointments and consulting her for the downtown traffic report. Most notably, Scorsese and Siri together show…

1600-Question Test Shows How Bad Siri Really Is

Pitting Google search against Siri using a monster 1600-question test shows how useful Siri really is: not at all. Google answered correctly 86 percent of the time. Siri achieved just 68 percent accuracy. At that point, it’s not much better than a crystal ball. We knew that Siri isn’t very good. But this intense test…

Do You Actually Use Voice Commands on Your Smartphone?

If the last month has made anything evident, it’s that tech companies are not treating voice recognition as a gimmick, and in fact, are increasingly paying more attention to it. But like our friend Matt Buchanan points out, it’s sort of de-humanizing. Is this something you actually use? How do you use it? Do you…

Siri Is on iPad with iOS 6

>Siri is moving beyond the iPhone 4S. In today’s WWDC keynote, Scott Forstall announced that it’s migrating to the new iPad with iOS 6. In fact, Siri has vastly improved with the next-gen mobile operating system. Apple has added some pretty cool features—movies, restaurant reservations, and Yelp reviews. Adding it to the iPad is going…

Siri Is Actually Incredibly Useful Now

Siri hasn’t been perfect to this point, but Apple has added some pretty awesome new worlds to ask her about: Sports, restaurants, movies. Pretty much enough to plan a whole date right through Siri. Here’s the laundry list: You can ask about the scores of live games—”What’s the score of the Giants game?”—or about individual…

8 Ways to Make Siri Smarter

Siri isn’t quite everything we hoped it would be. Laptop Magazine’s Mark Spoonauer has some ideas on how to transform Siri from novelty to utility. Here are 8 ways to make Siri Smarter… For me, the beauty of Siri on the iPhone 4S isn’t her ability to answer pretty much anything on “Jeopardy!”-though my 8-year-old…