Siri - page 25

As Apple rolls out Siri beyond the iPhone and into shared devices like the iPad and, most recently, Apple TV, Cupertino’s engineers have been working on a way of letting its voice activation technology pick up individual users, and offer them customized options based on their past preferences.

Published today as the patent “User profiling for voice input processing,” the technology would allow Apple to make better use of Siri (and voice recognition in general) as it moves into new fields like home automation and vehicles.

The new Apple TV is here, and there’s no doubt it’s the best set-top box we’ve seen from Cupertino, with powerful new hardware and the tvOS operating system, Siri integration — and most importantly, support for third-party apps and games.

If you’re into movies and TV shows, or playing the greatest iOS games on your big screen, the new Apple TV is probably at the top of your wish-list if you haven’t already bought one. But how does it compare to the other products Apple has launched this year? Is it better than the rest?

Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over that very question!

Apple TV’s Siri-enabled universal search feature is set to come to Apple Music early next year, Apple has confirmed.

The feature means that Apple TV users will be able to request to find songs, artists or albums in the way that they can currently find movies or TV shows.

Siri has a few extremely scientific and mathematical costume suggestions for Saturday’s festivities, but good luck figuring out how to implement most of them.

You can get prompts from Apple’s digital assistant by asking, “What should I be for Halloween?” to your favorite iOS device. Siri’s ideas aren’t bad if you can find a way to make them work. Check out a few of them below, which we captured from an Apple Watch.

If you want Siri to tell you everything there is to know about music you might need an Apple Music subscription to get the right answers.

The three-month trial period for Apple Music has finally ended, and it appears that not signing up for the monthly service may cost you a bit of Siri functionality.

If you’re even slightly interested in having smart lighting for your house, the new Philips Hue bridge, which supports Apple’s HomeKit automated-home framework, should be in your shopping cart right now.

Controlling your lights from your phone is one level of crazy future-stuff, but doing it with your voice drops you into an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And you definitely want your home to feel like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Maybe there aren’t a ton of new features in iOS 9, but you may find yourself getting tighter with Siri.

Siri is out to earn the title of “Best Assistant” with a series of new tricks aimed at making your life easier.

You no longer have to set a time for Siri to remind you to do tasks. You will automatically get reminders once you arrive or leave a location. No time to read an email or an interesting article? Ask her to remind you later and she will do so.

Siri can call up any photo you like based on a location or timestamp. She can also give you sports scores without directing you to a website, can convert measurements and, if you have a shiny new iPhone 6s, there is no need to press the home button to summon her. Just say, “Hey Siri.”

To see how Siri worked for me, check out the video below.

Ford owners with a second-generation Sync infotainment system can now get Apple’s Siri Eyes Free feature for iPhone on the car dashboard, thanks to a new Sync 3.8 update.

The second-gen Sync system is found on Ford vehicles made since 2011 and earlier, but the company is just now making Siri Eyes Free available on its vehicles, even though Apple rolled out the feature with iOS 6 back in 2012.

Siri can be silently put to work against you, thanks to a new hack discovered by French security researchers that allows attackers to transmit orders to the digital assistant via a radio.

The hack also works on Google Now and utilizes the headphone cord as an antenna to convert electromagnetic waves into signals that register in iOS and Android as audio coming from the microphone. José Lopes Esteves and Chaouki Kasmie — the two French researchers that discovered the hack — wrote in their paper that hackers could use the attack to get Siri and Google Now to send the phone’s browser to a malware site, or send spam and phishing messages to friends.

“The sky is the limit here,” says Vincent Strubel, the director of their research group at ANSSI. “Everything you can do through the voice interface you can do remotely and discreetly through electromagnetic waves.”

You should be excited to get Siri up and running with your new Philips Hue bridge and control your lights with the power of your voice, but one annoying error might stop you. It definitely had me scouring the Internet for answers when I was setting up my smartbulb system this afternoon, and I’d love to save you that time.

Because if you’ve spent $200 on fancy lightbulbs, you probably want to start using them right away, damn it.

Now if Cupertino really wanted to make Siri something special, they would give her a head, arms and legs, and make her dance when she plays music.

Sharp Electronics has either jumped ahead of Apple or jumped the shark tank with an animated robotic smartphone called RoBoHon. It does everything your current smartphone does but with moving appendages, an adorable, futuristic face and a sweet voice to make it a very personable sidekick.

Thanks to its arrival at major retailers like Target and Best Buy, the Apple Watch is going (more) mainstream — and Apple wants potential customers to know exactly what they’ll be able to do with their new wearable devices.

In six cool new ads, Apple shows off nifty Watch features like Apple Pay, Siri, Maps, voice messaging, fitness tracking, and more.

Check them out below.

Apple is beefing up its Artificial Intelligence tech with the purchase of Perceptio, a small startup that worked on creating advanced AI systems on smartphones.

Perceptio’s specialization was figuring out how to run complex neural network algorithms without needing to share as much user data. That would seem to fall in line with Apple’s goal of providing more robust features for Siri without compromising users’ privacy in the process.

iOS 9’s new always-on “Hey Siri” feature promises to be a game changer for iPhone 6s-owning users of Apple’s AI assistant. For the first time ever, these owners won’t have to plug in their handsets in order to use Siri’s new voice activation tech.

So how exactly will this untethered “Hey Siri” improve your life? Let us count the ways…

Google voice searches just got faster and more accurate, thanks to new acoustic models that provide better voice recognition, especially in noisy environments.

Some iPhone and iPad users upgrading to iOS 9 today have been looking forward to expressing their love of tacos, burritos, and unicorns — and their disdain for everything else — using the much-touted new emojis, which include the coveted and versatile “middle finger” icon.

But unfortunately for those folks, we’re going to have to wait a little longer to start flipping things the bird.

iOS 9 won’t shock you with a bunch of whiz-bang new features or a drastic new look, but in many ways, Apple’s latest mobile operating system is more important than its two immediate predecessors. While iOS 7 and iOS 8 laid a foundation that embraced the future of mobile design, iOS 9 is making all those changes worth a damn.

Apple drops iOS 9 today, bringing a more intelligent UI, better built-in apps, a smarter Siri and much more. Our iOS 9 review shows how the new software makes everything you do on your iPhone or iPad easier — and far faster — than ever before.

The days of having a junk drawer full of stock iOS apps might finally be coming to an end.

On the way to a surprise appearance at the Fifth Ave Apple Store, BuzzFeed spent 20 minutes with Tim Cook, who revealed some iOS apps will come with a delete option soon. The Apple CEO also talked about the future of computing, 3D Touch, “Hey Siri” privacy concerns and more. Here are the most interesting tidbits from Cook’s drive-by interview:

Siri has been involved with some pretty memorable moments as of late, whether it’s saving the life of a teenager stuck under a truck, or asserting itself as the new voice interface for Apple TV.

Now you can add shutting down questions about Barack Obama’s Iran policy to the list!

Check out the hilarious video below.

Jen Folse used the Apple stage Wednesday to tell the world about Apple TV. She used her nails to express her loyalty to the company.

If you got close enough to Apple’s lone female staffer to present at the company’s fall product event Wednesday, you could see the wavy lines of blue, pink, red, yellow and white on her nails painted to look like Siri’s Apple Watch interface. Those same colors were also used in official promotions of the fall showcase.

Have a look:

In less than 24 hours Tim Cook and company will take the stage at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium to unveil Apple’s latest products. We pretty much already know everything Apple’s going to announce, but if you ask Siri to give you a hint her responses are just as maddening as they were when Apple sent out invites.

Apple updated Siri’s hints this morning in anticipation of the event, and while some of the responses begin to appear to reveal info, the digital assistant gets the last laugh in the end.

Check out Siri’s five new hints:

We’ve been waiting years for Apple to wow us with a new Apple TV that embraces gaming, controls the home and is super-easy to use — and that appears to be just what we’re going to get.

Thanks to a steady stream of leaks from the rumor mill, we already have a pretty solid idea what Apple will show us next week when it finally unveils the new Apple TV. It’s been years in the making — here’s what to expect.

The price tag for the redesigned Apple TV will start at $149, according to a new report that also outlines how Apple plans to set its new set-top box apart from Roku and Amazon’s offerings by making it ridiculously easy to use.

We love how easy it is to set up an alarm from the Apple Watch. All you have to do is say, “Hey Siri, wake me up at 7 a.m.,” and the digital assistant will put that order in for you.

But this comes a slight inconvenience: What happens to alarms after you’re done using them? Well, if you’re like me, you just turn them off to stop the horrendous buzzing on your wrist and then forget about them. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here’s how to clear off all of those old, unused alarms with a quickness.

Apple just confirmed its big iPhone 6s event will take place September 9, and while the art on the invite didn’t offer any clues, Apple did give us one tip: Try asking Siri for hint.

Tim Cook’s not about to let his digital assistant leak details of the big event, but we decided to give it a try anyway. After begging Siri to give us a hint, a tip, anything, all we got back was more shade. But at least the replies were pretty funny.

Here are all of Siri’s hints: