Siri

As Apple hired away Google’s chief of search and AI this past spring, Tim Cook noted that he would be heading up the company’s AI and machine learning strategy. Now, we’re learning more about how some teams are being restructured in a way that could bring future improvements to Siri and more.

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One of the more exciting things that users are looking forward to in iOS 12 is the new Shortcuts app. While it’s an invite-only beta via TestFlight, we’ve managed to get our hands on it, and this is what we think thus far…

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Apple is making its new Shortcuts app in iOS 12 available for developer testing ahead of release through TestFlight. Shortcuts is based on Apple’s acquisition of Workflow and be available in the App Store when iOS 12 is released later this fall.

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Apple’s senior director of Siri, Alex Acero, will be speaking at the upcoming AI Frontiers conference this fall. The event is slated to take place from November 9th through November 11th at the San Jose Convention Center in California…

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‘Raise To Speak’ Siri is a new Apple Watch feature included in the watchOS 5 update that allows you to activate the voice assistant without saying ‘Hey Siri’ or pressing any buttons.

Raise to Speak was first announced at WWDC in early June, but the feature didn’t appear to work when watchOS 5 beta 1 and beta 2 were first released. That’s changed for several testers in the last few days however. Here’s how to double-check you have Raise to Speak enabled and how to try it:

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A new survey of smart speaker owners found that only 6% of them are currently using the device to control smart home devices like lighting and heating.

Interestingly, even for HomePod – which is a very music-focused device – playing music was only the third most common use …

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Siri has always been above average when it comes to talking about sports. Now, Apple is adding support for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in its virtual assistant.

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A cybersecurity company has demonstrated how a Siri feature could be exploited by scammers to assist with phishing attempts.

The approach replies on the way that Siri attempts to identify unknown callers, potentially presenting you with a misleading impression of who they are …

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If you prefer Alexa to Siri, you’ve been able to use Amazon’s voice assistant on your iPhone for more than a year now.

There’s no official support yet on the Apple Watch, but a third-party app now lets you do it via a watch complication …

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Siri Shortcuts is Apple’s answer to a more robust personal assistant across their product line. A near visual clone to its predecessor Workflow, the new Shortcuts app brings deeper automation to iOS devices. Developers will be able to create “donations“, specific actions within their apps, that can then be controlled by Siri. By chaining these donations together, users will be able to personalize Siri requests to fit their personal use cases.

During the WWDC 2018 keynote, Apple demoed just how much Shortcuts is able to accomplish. Kim Beverett from the Siri Shortcuts team created a custom shortcut that allowed her to: send someone a message on her ETA, navigate to her home, set her HomeKit thermostat to 70 degrees, turn on her fan, and then play her favorite NPR station.

Although Siri Shortcuts isn’t officially out yet, even on the iOS 12 developer beta, we can surface a lot of this functionality with the currently available Workflow app. Let’s dive in.

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Apple was the first company to bring a voice-driven intelligent assistant to the masses. Since then, however, it’s been overtaken in capabilities by both Google and Amazon.

As I’ve written before, that’s not coincidence. Google collects and analyzes huge volumes of personal data to help make its intelligent assistant as powerful as possible. Amazon lets anyone create a ‘recipe’ which any Echo owner can use. Apple, in contrast, chooses to limit the amount of personal data it collects and uses, and tightly controls access to Siri by third-party companies.

That approach has arguably become a strong selling-point at a time when the privacy of user data has become headline news in the mainstream press. All the same, many Siri users do find it frustrating that Apple’s AI – the one that once led the market – is now the dumbest kid on the block …

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We’re officially less than a week away from the start of WWDC, which means it’s time to start getting in your last-minute predictions. This evening, Apple analyst Gene Munster has shared his rundown of predictions, including a new Beats speaker…

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The WSJ has an interesting piece looking at how AI and other forms of technology are transforming the lives of blind people.

Microsoft’s Seeing AI app is one particularly dramatic example – able to do things like identify faces, recognize bank notes, read handwriting and so on – but Apple’s tech is also said to be incredibly valuable …

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Over the last few days, a story has been making the rounds claiming that Siri itself is teasing a major overhaul coming at WWDC next month, as well as a new HomePod. Essentially, if you say to Siri, “Tell me about WWDC,” it teases that it’ll be getting “a lot smarter” and getting a new “home.”

In actuality, these are the same responses Siri offered up after last year’s WWDC when the HomePod was introduced…

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A group of students from Berkeley have demonstrated how malicious commands to Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa can be hidden in recorded music or innocuous-sounding speech.

Simply playing the tracks over the radio, streaming music track or podcast could allow attackers to take control of a smart home …

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The lack of Calendar support for Siri on HomePod has been a glaring issue of Apple’s home speaker since its release earlier this year. Now new evidence suggests that will soon change when iOS 11.4 is released.

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I’ve written on a couple of occasions about how Apple’s approach to Siri differs from the intelligent assistants offered by Amazon and Google.

The tl;dr version is that Apple has gone all-in on privacy, while Google takes the ‘hoover up as much data as possible’ approach, and Amazon has opened up Alexa to, well, anyone who wants to make it do something.

But while Apple’s privacy focus explains some of Siri’s limited abilities, it doesn’t excuse them all. HomePod brought Siri’s limitations into sharp focus, and the upcoming introduction of Siri to two new products will further increase the pressure for a smarter Siri …

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Apple’s Siri team has published a new Machine Learning Journal entry that details some of the process behind making voice-activated ‘Hey Siri’ work with just our voice. Apple previously documented part of the process behind pulling off voice-activated Siri in general last fall, and the first Machine Learning Journal entry of this year focuses on the challenge of speaker recognition.

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