Siri

Roku has poached a senior Siri manager from Apple, as first reported by Bloomberg. Brian Pinkerton joined Roku this month as the company’s senior vice president of advanced development after spending nearly three years as a Siri chief architect at Apple.

Speculation about plans for an Apple search engine to compete with Google has been around for many years now, ever since the company was first seen to be using its own web crawler back in 2014. Apple confirmed the existence of the Applebot crawler in 2015.

A report in the Financial Times claims that Apple is now ‘stepping up’ efforts to create its own search engine as its lucrative deal with Google comes under threat …

One of the big improvements in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 is that Siri no longer takes over the whole screen. However, in the early betas you couldn’t interact with Siri and apps at the same time – doing anything with an app, even scrolling, would dismiss Siri.

A Redditor noticed that this is no longer the case on the iPad as of iPadOS 14 beta 5 …

Apple takes great pride in its Accessibility features, promotes them heavily, and has won awards for them. For someone living with a disability, the right technology can literally be life-changing. Apple’s technology helps many people live a more independent life.

There is, though, still room for improvement. To better understand the differences Apple technology makes, and the gaps that still exist, I interviewed Colin Hughes, a 55-year-old Brit who has severe muscular dystrophy – a muscle-wasting disease which leaves him effectively quadriplegic, unable to use either arms or legs …

A Chinese company that has accused Apple of patent infringement wants to ban Siri in China until the case is finally decided. It is asking the court for an injunction of the sale of all products which include Siri – which is almost everything Apple makes.

The application follows an earlier court victory in which Xiao-i (whose full name is Shanghai Zhizhen Network Technology Co) was awarded a Chinese patent for a virtual intelligent assistant …

EU competition regulators are in the early stages of investigating voice assistants including Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, according to a new report from Reuters. This comes as Apple faces a probe into App Store In-App Purchase rules and Apple Pay in Europe, as well.

Expand
Expanding
Close

A head-to-head test of voice dictation on iPhone and Pixel shows that the Google smartphone is significantly faster than Siri at transcribing the speech into text.

The Pixel kept up with fairly rapid speech, while the iPhone lagged notably behind, as seen in the video below…

Expand
Expanding
Close

The Siri grading whistleblower who revealed that private conversations were overheard by contractors working on improving Apple’s intelligent assistant has today revealed his identity.

He has done so in a letter to the European Union, calling for Apple to face the consequences of its privacy failure …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Earlier this year, I was given an advanced look at beta firmware with the Neato D7. Inside this beta firmware was support for Siri Shortcuts. You might be asking yourself: why do I need a vacuum cleaner with Siri support? Since I’ve never used this robot without Siri support, I’ll explain some of the ways I am using it.
Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple has updated Siri to provide new responses to questions about COVID-19. As first reported by CNBC, the virtual assistant now includes answers from the CDC and other sources when asked about the virus.

Expand
Expanding
Close

While Xnor.ai was best known for its ability to detect people in smart camera feeds, Macworld suggests that Apple’s main motivation for buying the company may have been to make Siri smarter.

The most obvious reason for Apple’s acquisition of Xnor.ai was to improve people detection in HomeKit Secure Video. But as we noted at the time, the company’s tech has broader applications …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Ekster wasn’t on my radar until just about a month ago when I got to test out the company’s smart wallets and I’ve found myself very impressed with the design, build quality, and functionality of the offerings. Read on for our full review of Ekster’s smart wallets and what sets them apart from the rest of the market. And, yep, the company is also doing a Black Friday promotion with a 40% off deal.

Expand
Expanding
Close