Following first hands-on demonstrations of Siri's app integration that select developers gave to The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Olivarez-Giles last week, Apple on Thursday published an article of its own to share more details regarding Siri integrations for payments, messaging apps and more.
As a quick backgrounder, Siri on iOS 10 will work with your apps thanks to Apple's new SiriKit framework which was designed to help developers integrate Siri functionality into their own apps.
Capabilities of SiriKit, a new iOS 10 framework that lets third-party apps work with Siri, were on full display in the first hands-on demonstration given to Nathan Olivarez-Giles of the Wall Street Journal. In addition to extending Siri’s support for messaging, photo search and phone calls to more apps, SiriKit also adds support for new services, including ride booking and personal payments.
Nathan was pretty impressed with the usefulness of Siri's app integration on iOS 10, calling it a “long-overdue” enhancement that will make Apple's personal digital assistant “more useful in everyday life” than it's ever been.
Journalist Steven Levy's excellent in-depth look at Apple's machine learning and artificial intelligence systems used throughout iOS and its other products have left some people wondering about transferring the so-called iBrain database to a new device. Apple told Levy that iBrain is local to a device and doesn't get sent to the cloud.
The explanation promoted some people to wonder if that means that iBrain has to start all over again after getting a new phone, and lose all memory of what it learned in the process. As it turns out, some of the information in that “brain” can indeed be restored and moved to a new device in a safe manner.
Apple today released an eighth beta of iOS 10 (build number “14A5346a”) to members of the Apple Developer Program and the seventh beta of iOS 10 to public beta testers who are signed on the Apple Beta Software Program. It's worth repeating that iOS 10 beta 8 for developers and iOS 10 beta 7 for public beta testers contain the same features.
The devices on a prior beta can be updated in Settings → General → Software Update, but some users are reporting issues trying to update to beta 8.
Respected journalist Steven Levy has scored another nice exclusive with a new write-up over at Backchannel, a Wired Media Group property, giving us a rare inside look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple.
The article contains a lot of gems, with company executives Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, Phil Schiller and Siri leads Tom Gruber and Alex Acero providing a bunch of previously unknown facts about Apple's AI efforts, including this one: machine learning has enabled Apple to cut Siri's error rate by a factor or two.
Will iOS 10 hit on September 30? We don't know, but that's what well-known singer, actress, songwriter and filmmaker Barbra Streisand seems to have alluded in an interview with NPR, saying she picked up the phone and called Tim Cook after becoming frustrated with how Siri pronounced her name.
The CEO of Apple reportedly promised a fix for Siri to pronounce the actress's name correctly with the next update on September 30.
Apple on Friday seeded the seventh beta of iOS 10 to developers. Registered developers running the latest betas can access the update via the OTA mechanism in iOS, or as a standalone download via Apple’s developer center.
Today's release obviously comes as a surprise, given that Apple just issued beta 6 on Monday. The timing suggests that Apple has entered the fine-tuning stage, as it prepares to release iOS 10 to the public in the next few weeks.
Apple is hiring a Lyrics Curation Manager to lead a team of 'Lyrics Curators,' likely to work on the new song lyrics feature in iOS 10's Music app. The job listing, first spotted by MusicBusinessWorldwide, was posted to Apple's website within the last week.
The position calls for someone with excellent writing skills, music knowledge, and attention to detail, as well as a passion for technology and experience writing lyrics. They must also have experience with managing complex teams and using complicated tools.
As you know, Apple yesterday seeded a sixth beta of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra to its registered developers and public beta testers along with developer-only builds of watchOS 3 and tvOS 10.
As we're now weeks away from their tentative fall release, small wonder the latest betas lack new outward-facing features. Here's Andrew's hands-on video detailing changes in the latest betas of iOS 10, macOS Sierra and watchOS 3.
Apple has seeded the sixth beta of iOS 10, watchOS 3, macOS Sierra, and tvOS 10 to developers today. These new beta software versions come a week after the previous versions. Touting the usual bug fixes and improvements, these betas aren't likely coming with new features, but rather with small adjustments to both the UI and existing features.
iOS 10 turns the iPhone's boring Phone app into a software platform in its own right. Developers are now permitted to add previously unheard-of capabilities to Phone using Apple's new application programming interface (API), called CallKit, allowing Voice over IP (VoIP) calls from apps like Skype and WhatsApp to behave like cellular calls.
CallKit-enabled apps put contact images on the Lock screen for incoming VoIP calls and are deeply integrated with Contacts and Phone's Recents and Favorites.
Phone on iOS 10 packs in other exciting improvements that we honestly started to believe would never get implemented on the iOS platform, like voicemail transcription à la Google Voice and third-party extensions for detecting spammy calls automatically.
So let's get to it...
Here's a time-saving enhancement discovered in the previous beta of iOS 10: deleting text faster—a lot faster—with 3D Touch. Although this very cool feature originally flew under our radar, we're letting you guys know about it so that you're kept in the loop. Owners of an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus should be especially pleased with iOS 10's expanded use of 3D Touch gestures for things like clearing all notifications, sharing apps and renaming folders.