In the spirit of connecting your phone’s activity to the cloud, a trend that has inspired one of this week’s more interesting launches, Phonedeck, there now comes another application that wants to automatically track your activity in order to provide a history of your communications, additional analysis, and even a search engine for your own life.
The app is called Friday, and it’s now… → Read More
A palate-cleanser for the four course meal that will be your long and fruitful day: Yoni Heisler recounts a talk by Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus in which he describes the naming process. Siri means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian and Kittlaus owned the siri.com domain. He was planning on naming a child after said beautiful woman but his first child was a boy. Instead, he… → Read More
Editor’s Note: Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures and Bill Mark is the Vice President of the Information Computing Sciences Division at renowned research and technology development organization, SRI International. Norman and Bill helped found the Siri venture, of which Norman was also a Board member.
Since its launch in the iPhone 4S, Siri has become a phenomenon, and for good… → Read More
Only yesterday we reported that Evi, a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app (link) which was incredibly Siri-like – and some say it’s better – had gotten a call from Apple that it was about to be pulled from the App store. Why? For being – as far as we could figure out – too much like Siri, and maybe, well, just too good.
Today, the buzz at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is that Apple… → Read More
Last month we reported on the launch of Evi, a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app (link) which was very Siri-like in its capabilities. Maybe it was too good at acting like Siri?
Yes, Evi can’t do Siri’s trick of adding things to your iPhone Calendar or hook into reminders. But, ask “How do I make apple pie?” and Evi provides a list of recipes with web links. Siri can’t give you a direct… → Read More
When Siri was announced strictly for the iPhone 4S, the mod community likely took that as a challenge. Before long, the service had been hacked and shortly thereafter ported to a number of potentially compatible devices.
The problem, of course, is that Apple gets to decide what devices are compatible, not the users. So they’ve taken steps to undo the work that hackers and jailbreakers have done… → Read More
There’s no shortage of novel things you can strongarm Siri into doing for you these days, but sometimes it’s the little things that get me excited.
While not as innately flashy as being able to start a car, a new (and currently nameless) tweak from developer InfectionFX does something that Siri should have been able to do from the beginning: tweet for you. → Read More
Personalized web search tool Trapit, often called the sister to Apple’s Siri because both were built on the same artificial intelligence project from DARPA and SRI, has just raised $6.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Horizons Ventures, the Hong Kong-based venture fund that manages the investments for Facebook and Spotify investor Li Ka-shing. Horizons also previously invested… → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks… → Read More
When we first introduced the Siri clone Iris, I figured that would be the last of the outright Siri-alikes. I was wrong. Programmers are taking advantage of less experienced users and creating apps that are downright insulting to the average intelligence.
One app, called Siri for Android is a hard link to Google’s voice controls while another, called Speerit is a Korean clone that purports to… → Read More
Well-known iOS hacker chpwn (aka Grant Paul) along with Ryan Petrich have released a new tool for installing Siri on jailbroken phones. The Siri port, called “Spire,” works on any phone that can run iOS 5. However, because Apple only officially supports Siri requests coming from the iPhone 4S, a proxy server address is still required.
Oh, there’s one more thing: Spire is legal. → Read More
2011 saw the rise and fall of Siri. What was initially hailed as something just short of the savior of mankind turned out to be a limited voice control system. Apple insists Siri is still a beta product. They say it will get better.
But some out there couldn’t wait for Apple. And so, with a little imagineering, people made Siri do all sorts of unconventional tasks in 2011. These hacks led to… → Read More
In what Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan calls a ‘good outcome’ on Twitter, the voice-to-text technology company has just been acquired by speech recognition king Nuance.
Notably, Nuance has repeatedly sued Vlingo over patent infringement – and tried to acquire them – in the past, and Grannan once referred to competing with Nuance as “having a venereal disease that’s in remission”. → Read More
Last week, Microsoft overhauled the Xbox 360. The update brought dozens of new features, but there was one I was particularly excited about: when paired with a Kinect, the new interface was said to pack voice recognition support pretty much everywhere.
As I noted in my initial Kinect review well over a year ago, the Kinect’s voice system was the one bit I found particularly disappointing. → Read More
While Siri is no doubt one of the coolest features I’ve ever seen on a phone, we’re all still dealing with some form of disenchantment. Siri blows your mind that first day, and then it feels like you spend the rest of your time chasing that magic, repeating things so she’ll understand, waiting for her to get over “trouble connecting to the network,” etc.
Luckily though, Apple is on the hunt… → Read More
iPhone jailbreakers should probably stay away from the latest Siri port, dubbed H1Siri, which brings Apple’s digital assistant to the iPhone 4. The new hack comes from a group of Chinese hackers calling themselves the “CD-Dev Team.” According to the team’s account on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter), the hackers had originally wanted to just run a small test, but the… → Read More
If you’ve already seen this, watch it again. Here’s veteran comedian Robin Williams on the Ellen Show talking about “the new future” and bringing up the technology du jour, Siri. I mean just the fact that this is happening is absurd, but then, then … → Read More
While Apple’s engineers toil away deep in the heart of their Cupertino headquarters, developers have taken it upon themselves to make Siri even more impressive than usual. Forget about setting reminders and checking the weather — with a little bit of know-how (and a homebrew proxy server), Siri can start your car for you. → Read More
Serving as a stark reminder that there are people on the Internet who are way, way too damned clever, the guys over at the iPhone design/development house Applidium claim to have cracked open Siri to take an unsanctioned look at its (her? his?) inner workings. In a rare (but quite welcome. I mean, by us. Probably not by Apple) move, they’ve gone on to do a rather detailed debriefing of how they… → Read More
The iPhone 4S is on the streets, and accompanying it is a helpful young virtual assistant named Siri. You’ve probably heard something about Siri by this point, as tech blogs and the media writ large, have been yammering about Siri’s technology at full blast. Since the beginning, and even more so since Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010, there’s been a lot of excitement about voice recognition… → Read More
Recently we’ve seen reports flying around claiming that Apple has plans to put Siri on older generation devices, and may even be testing out the personal assistant on the iPhone 4. The news seemed more than a bit unexpected, so we decided to wait for Apple’s confirmation.
Lo and behold, Apple has responded just as we thought they would: Siri is an iPhone 4S exclusive, at least in any official… → Read More
Apple has done the one thing it must do to stand up to Google and the loss of Jobs: go to the Cloud. Take the Beta designation — all Google products were beta until Google Apps went after enterprise sales. With Google+ now reworking the front end of all of the products, it seems beta is back in business. For Apple, it means something different: “We’re looking for your help in creating the… → Read More
The backlash was inevitable.
Siri has had a bit of an image problem this past week. Just like all technology propelled by the tailwinds of hype, it hit the inevitable wall of tech punditry. This magically turned the stream of largely positive stories into a river of negative stories under the guise of things like: “the voice of reason” or the “wake up call”. It’s the oldest trick in the book… → Read More
Maybe we need a new website, IsSiriDownForEveryoneOrJustForMe.com, because it looks like Siri is experiencing an extended outage, according to several tipsters, tweets, and our own internal tests. When you try to use Siri on the iPhone 4S right now, the usually perky virtual assistant just responds: “Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network” and does nothing. → Read More
When Apple first unveiled the iPhone 4S, there was one feature that left every jaw in the room on the floor. Her name is Siri. Scott Forstall demoed the personal assistant at Apple’s media event, and the entire presentation went off without a hitch. Then, as expected, Apple released their commercials, which were equally impressive. In short, everyone and their brother was amped for Siri.
Then… → Read More
It’s been proven again and again that Siri has a peculiar sense of humor, but what if there was something more calculating, more sinister hiding beneath that jovial facade? Well, dock your iPhone 4S into ThinkGeek’s new IRIS 9000 voice control module, and you may soon find out.
On paper, the IRIS 9000 is pretty straightforward — once the iPhone is in place, just carry around the included… → Read More
Already we’re seeing microbridges being set up, like the one that puts Twitter into your Contacts list as an SMS address so you can ask Siri to Tweet out a message. As these hacks accelerate, it will be incumbent upon Apple to expand API access to the routing layer so that third parties and especially users themselves can construct these macros. The more they’re used, the more the business… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — rebounded from a seven and a half minute gap to explore the mysteries of the Siri platform. As machines give up being trained by us and reciprocate by rewarding us for compliant behavior, our gestures are being finetuned to a social pitch.
While no one was looking, Apple has provided a fresh and… → Read More
It’s Friday. Time to sit back, put your feet up, and crack open a cold one. Better yet, why not let Siri pour your beer for you? All you need is an iPhone 4S and a can of somethin’ nice. And an R/C car. And an Arduino hooked up to a Twitter account. And a sharp tack, and…. yeah, you get the point. → Read More
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