Siri

There is nothing sweeter than pulling out your phone, asking it a question, and getting back the one obscure piece of information you need to settle a debate or win a drunken bet. Smartphones from Google, Apple, and Microsoft all offer a personal assistant who claims to be flush with knowledge drawn from around the Continue Reading →

Siri, Apple’s voice-powered virtual assistant, is pretty musically inclined. She’s been able to manipulate your music library for quite some time, letting you play specific tracks, albums, and genres with a simple command. Now with iOS 8, her musical powers have expanded even further. For those with downloaded music on their iOS device, you can Continue Reading →

If you think Siri is great, wait until you get a hold of Viv. Developed by the creative team behind Siri, Viv blows Siri out of the water. While Siri is limited to the tasks Apple wants it to do, Viv can teach itself and break down commands or questions into individual parts, figure everything Continue Reading →

If you really want to be able to emulate the characters in Apple’s promotional videos then you need to be able to tell Siri to “call mom” and “email dad.” Thanks to the custom label field built into iCloud contacts, you can assign any kind of relationship to people you know. Tell Siri about your Continue Reading →

When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to Continue Reading →

While Apple’s Siri has been an iOS staple since 2011, the tech has yet to make the jump to OS X. An exhaustive new patent filing, however, details a very similar desktop version of the virtual assistant that can perform dictation, high-level system commands and even act as a “third hand” for Mac users. As Continue Reading →

It all started at a small academic get-together in Whistler, British Columbia. The topic was speech recognition, and whether a new and unproven approach to machine intelligence—something called deep learning—could help computers more effectively identify the spoken word. Microsoft funded the mini-conference, held just before Christmas 2009, and two of its researchers invited the world’s Continue Reading →

Apple’s voice-activated assistant is now a well-known personality in his/her own right, but unless you’ve taken the time to dig into all the features that Siri offers you might not realize just now capable it is (particularly since the arrival of iOS 7). Here are seven ways to get Siri working harder for you. Siri Continue Reading →

We already know Apple is working on improving Siri, but gosh dangit, the folks in Cupertino just aren’t moving as fast as some would like. That’s why a quartet of freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania decided to try making Siri do more on their own… at a hackathon, no less. They wound up taking Continue Reading →

Looks like Microsoft isn’t the only latecomer scrambling to add a voice-guided assistant to its mobile platform. A leaked test-build of the new BlackBerry firmware (version 10.3.0.140, if you’re curious) is rocking an app called “Intelligent Assistant,” but as both N4BB and a ZonaBlackBerry forum poster have noticed, it doesn’t quite work yet. The application Continue Reading →