Since Apple introduced Siri last fall, folks have been going through great lengths to install it on other devices. But Apple has continued to keep the feature exclusive to the iPhone 4S. Until now, that is.
Along with a number of other Siri-related announcements this morning, Apple announced that iOS 6 would be bringing the digital assistant to the latest iPad. So you know iDB had to go hands-on...
Siri has received a major update with iOS 6. She can now provide sport scores for the NBA, NFL, etc. She can also tell you batting averages for specified baseball players, and provide arbitrary information like the height differences between basketball players. And this is just the very tip of the iceberg. There's also integration with Rotten Tomatoes to highlight movie reviews, and even watch trailers from within Siri.
Even better is the fact that the iPad is now officially receiving Siri support!
Much as it has been speculated, Apple is apparently working to enable Siri on iPad by way of iOS 6, according to the inevitable people familiar with the matter. We're talking about full-blown voice assistant, not just the Dictation feature, and it will reportedly work just as you'd expect it to. Here's a mockup based on the description provided by the source...
Do you rarely use dictation on your iPhone? Would you prefer if there was a way to completely get rid of the dictation button without totally getting rid of Siri? Well, if you're jailbroken, now you can.
Introducing: NoDictation — a simple jailbreak tweak that removes the dictation button on the iPhone keyboard once installed. The nice thing about NoDictation is that you can disable dictation on your iPhone, without having to totally disable Siri.
Take a look at our video walkthrough of NoDictation for more information on how it operates...
Are your Siri conversations feeling a bit like a dead end? Are you looking for a more conversational personal assistant? If that's the case, then PersistentAssistant is a jailbreak tweak you need to investigate. PersistentAssistant forces Siri to continuously listen for new queries until your close the Siri window, making for a more engaging conversation.
PersistentAssistant is especially useful if you're in a situation where you can't use your hands to continuously re-invoke Siri — for example, when driving. Check out our video walkthrough inside to see how it works...
Be careful how you call Siri. Apple's boss Tim Cook says the controversial digital secretary is "your best friend", teasing "you'll be really pleased with some of the things" the company has in store. We also have a cool vid with Cook fielding questions from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at yesterday's D10: All Things Digital talk.
So, is Siri up to Apple's standards? Here's from the mouth of Tim Cook himself...
So, the new Siri advertisements starring John Malkovich. At the end of one of the ads, the actor asks Siri to tell a joke. She comes up with a line that's long in the tooth, giving him the "two iPhones walk into a bar..." routine. What's that? Not funny, you say? Didn't crack me up either. There's a better version...
The Verge was first out of the gate today with its exhaustive review of Samsung's Galaxy S III handset. A section of the piece provides an interesting side-by-side comparison of two intelligent personal assistants, Siri on the iPhone 4S and Samsung's darling dubbed S-Voice.
Both features work as advertised (well, most of the time), amuse with canned responses, delight with factual answers - all the while letting you converse with your handset using natural language rather than remember a bunch of hard-coded commands.
Siri and S-Voice also score similarly in handling common tasks such as pulling local weather, creating appointments and reminders and what not. And of course S-Voice is a blatant rip off of Siri's user interface. Apple's digital secretary appears to be snappier at running queries and S-Voice at times has a hard time understanding what you want.
And here's a nice side-by-side comparison video laying it all out for you...
Ever since Apple unveiled Siri at its iPhone 4S media event last fall, the digital assistant has remained in the spotlight. Whether it's celebrity-laden TV spots or class-action lawsuits, it seems like it's always making headlines.
But some would argue that Siri is more of a black eye for Apple than an accomplishment. It's spent the last 9 months in beta, its location services still aren't available abroad, and its functionality in general is still super limited.
In fact, is anyone even using the feature anymore? Infographic time!
As noted by a number of other tech sites tonight, Apple has started airing two new iPhone 4S commercials featuring actor John Malkovich. You might recognize Malkovich from such films as Con Air, and Burn After Reading.
The two spots, both of which star the actor, are titled "Joke" and "Life" respectively. And like nearly all of Apple's iPhone 4S commercials before them, the new ads are all about Siri...
Have you ever wondered what happens to your conversations with Siri? Obviously your queries are sent over the internet to Apple's servers for processing, but what then? Does Apple store these conversations? Does anyone have access to them?
These questions seem to be heavy on the mind of IBM's Jeanette Horan, as the CIO recently told MIT's Technology Review that her company has banned Siri from their network over fears that the assistant could be logging sensitive information...
Nuance, which provides world-class voice recognition technology behind Apple's Siri personal assistant, today announced its entrance into the fast-growing connected cars market.
Their new automotive platform combines Nuance's Dragon software and natural language understanding technologies to allow drivers to dictate messages, search for content, control music playback, navigation and more.
Was this an iCar solution Steve Jobs was dreaming about in his final days?