Yet another member of the original Siri team, Darren Haas, has left Apple. The Information reports that Haas, one of the last remaining team members that came over to Apple in the Siri acquisition, has left the company for General Electric. He'll join Steve D'Aurora, another Siri team member who also left Apple for GE a few weeks ago.
Apple on Monday aired a new television commercial for the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, titled 'Thank You Speech' and starring “How I Met Your Mother” star Patrick Neil Harris (he had a cameo on Apple's recent 'Onions' ad).
The 30-second clip shows off a tetherless Siri feature that users can optionally enable on their iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus in order to converse with the personal digital assistant using the 'Hey Siri' keyword even when their device is not connected to power.
The creators of Siri are preparing to introduce a new AI assistant on Monday, reports The Washington Post. It's called 'Viv,' and it's far more advanced than Siri, capable of handling complex tasks like purchasing movie tickets or ordering pizza, without the need to switch between apps or other human interaction.
Unlike most virtual assistants today, which can understand precise queries and issue scripted responses, Viv can imitate "the spontaneity and knowledge base of a human assistant." So with this technology, and third-party app integration from the likes of Uber and Grubhub, Viv is expected to impress next week.
In addition to a nicely done environment-focused video posted yesterday, in which Apple boasts how its data centers run on 100 percent renewable energy, the Cupertino firm this morning released another Earth Day focused television ad on its YouTube channel, this one promoting recycling.
Featuring Siri and Apple's recycling robot Liam, the 25-second video has Siri conversing with the robot, asking him what he's doing for Earth Day.
A report Thursday published by the former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin's outlet, The Information, paints a gloomy picture for Apple's efforts to move its cloud services 100 percent in-house. That process has been slowed by “political infighting” as the company's iCloud and Siri engineering teams are now “in open conflict”.
The infighting is so bad, according to sources with direct knowledge of the situation, that at least one key employee has already departed, “with more expected soon,” reads the full report behind a paywall.
MacStories founder and editor Federico Viticci has joined forces with user interface designer Sam Beckett on giving us their take on some of the features that Apple may or may not implement in iOS 10, the next major revision of the mobile operating system powering the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
The stunning renderings and an accompanying video imagine many features that Apple fans have been craving for, such as a brand new dark mode for iOS 10, an updated Control Center which lets you move around and customize the icons, an official Siri app for implementing voice-activated features in third-party apps and more.
Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac has discovered that asking Siri about Apple's summer developers conference has now started to produce a more concrete answer than before. Whereas asking Siri about the WWDC 2016 schedule would yield a “WWDC is not yet announced” response just earlier in the day, a backend change has updated that answer with the June 13-17 date.
“The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will be held June 13 through June 17 in San Francisco. Can't wait!,” reads Siri's response.
Apple has enhanced the tvOS operating system via a silent backend update that now permits users to ask Siri to tune in to live broadcasts in supported apps such as Disney XD, ESPN and CBS, the latter having gained integration with the Apple TV's universal search feature yesterday.
MacRumors has caught wind of this useful new feature addition on a splash screen that customers see after upgrading their 4th-generation Apple TV to the new tvOS software.
Ahead of the upcoming April 24 premiere of the sixth season of HBO's popular “Game of Thrones” television show, Siri engineers seem to have updated her database to answer some of the most burning questions asked by fans, the most lingering one being “Is Jon Snow dead?”
Conveniently, Apple's made sure that the personal digital assistant is spoiler-free so you won't get anything out of her pertaining to whether or not the show’s most popular character has perished at the hands of the Night’s Watch.
Apple on Sunday released a brand new commercial for the fourth-generation Apple TV, titled 'Father Time' and available on YouTube.
The 60-second ad features LA Laker's star Kobe Bryant and actor Michael B. Jordan and focuses on using tvOS's Siri features in conjunction with the Siri Remote to “make it easier than ever to find and enjoy whatever you’re looking for.”
The two men are sitting on the couch in a trailer and Jordan picks up his Siri Remote to ask the personal digital assistant to open the official NBA app.
Then, they start arguing over... Well, just watch the ad.
Apple on Thursday shared a new video on its YouTube channel called "Timer - Behind the Scenes." As the name suggests, the clip offers a humorous behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iPhone 6s ad it released last month, starring the popular Sesame Street character Cookie Monster.
Dag Kittlaus, a brilliant artificial intelligence engineer who helped create an advanced personal digital assistant that Apple bought and marketed as Siri, is about to show his brand new artificial intelligence product to the world at TechCrunch's Disrupt NY 2016 conference later this week.
Kittalus, who co-founded Siri and was the CEO of the startup, has since moved on and co-founded another startup with Siri veterans Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, called Viv Labs, with the goal of radically simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything.