Siri could offer multiuser support

Apple has a newly granted patent for “User profiling for voice input processing,” which may be used for Siri. Siri can currently distinguish an iPhone owner’s voice from other people, but it can’t provide customized responses for different users.

The patent (broadly, if used) could allow a device to identify different users, through a variety of means,  including username and password, recognizing specific commands, or biometric voice print. The Siri could refer to a specific user’s content preferences, requests, and phrasings to make Siri more accurate.

Oh hiiiii Siri!

Siri coming to the Mac?

HEY SIRI! Will you always be stuck inside my iPhone?

Well, guy, maybe not, as the case may be. Now, no jumping too far ahead of yourself there, we’re not saying that she’s going to be a physical entity anytime soon (although don’t count it out?), rumor has it that Siri will be coming to a Mac computer near you, and soon.

How soon? Why, later this year, we’re so glad you asked! Apparently Siri will be a feature in OS X 10.12 which debut’s later this year. It’s had over 3 years of testing and will accessed through an icon in the menu bar as well as via a keyboard shortcut and by the “Hey Siri” command when the computer is connected to power.

OS X 10.12 will probably be announced at WWDC in June ahead of a fall release.

Found an iPhone?

Our phones are so many things to us all at once – cameras, photo albums, music holders, game machines, memory keepers, etc. But they’re also little, we take them most places we go and we also happen to be forgetful beings that suffer from brain farts. Which means sometimes, we lose our phones.

Disaster.

That disaster can turn into a positive experience however if someone finds your phone and is able to get it back to you. Because then you believe in the goodness of humanity and karma and wonderful disney things like that. And you will have an excellent day, and everyone you see will have an excellent day and the world will be a better place! Easy!

So. If you happen to find someone’s iPhone, please do the right thing and try your disney hardest (singing and dancing commentary not necessarily required) to get it back to them!

Remember, they may have Find My iPhone turned on and activated and they may be coming back to the very place the iPhone was lost. If it’s a safe place to be, try to stay there whilst you’re trying to contact them.

If the phone is unlocked, you should see if there is a contact listed under ‘ICE’ ( In Case of Emergency), or try looking for relative’s names such as Mum or Dad. Call them to let them know they have their friend or relative’s phone and where they can collect it from.

You can try looking under recent calls for someone to message or call but make sure that the name you choose is one that has been called often and doesn’t belong to a recent hook up or job interview! Awks.

Alternatively, pull down to swipe in contacts, above the search box, and you’ll see the owner’s phone number. Write it down, then type it into the phone. The owner’s name should appear below the number. Find their name in the Contacts list and then use their alternative contact details to reach them.

If the device is locked and it’s a model about the iPhone 4, try using Siri to call ‘ICE’ from the lock page. You could also try to call ‘Mom/dad’ or ‘my husband/my wife’.

If the battery is dead on the iPhone, you have two choices – you can either take it home and charge it and then try to find the owner, or you can hand it in to the police to do likewise.

And then feel all kinds of unicorn sparkle karma for the rest of the day! Yess. We loves us some unicorn sparkle karma.

iPhone Tip Of The Day

This one’s for the walkers out there, you good honest souls you! When using maps in iOS 7, you have the option to choose walking directions as a dafault in settings, and to have Siri read you the directions turn- by- turn. Snazzy.

To set walking directions as your default, go to Settings>Maps. Scroll down to the Preferred Directions section and choose between walking and driving.

To ask Siri to give you prompted map directions whilst walking, tap the Directions button in the top left hand corner, select the walking icon at the top of the screen, enter your destination and then tap Route.

Interesting, (and some might say challenging), fact for you – Given that the world is about 25,000 miles in circumference and that the average walking rate is 3 miles per hour, it would take a person walking nonstop approximately 347 days to walk around the world.

Go to it!

The Real Guide to Using Siri

Hands up who uses Siri?

A lot? Sometimes? Only to see if you can get funny answers?

There are a lot people that don’t know about mysterious Miss Siri. Did you know for example that you can do this with her?

No? Here’s part one of our complete rundown on Siri – what she is, what she can do to improve your life, and the future she can bring us.

Siri is an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator. She’s basically an App, present on all Apple devices after Siri was acquired by Apple on April 28, 2010. The original application ceased to function on October 14, 2011.

She uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Web services. Apple claims that the software adapts to the user’s individual preferences over time and personalizes results.

Although a lot of people think SIRI stand for ‘Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, the name Siri is actually Norwegian, meaning “beautiful woman who leads you to victory”. It was named after the intended name for the original developer’s first child.

Currently, Siri supports English (American, Canadian, Australian, British), French, German, Japanese, Italian (Italy, Switzerland), Spanish (Mexico, Spain), Mandarin (China, Taiwan), Korean, and Cantonese.

The original American voice was provided by Susan Bennett in July 2005. Now, in settings alongside your choice of language, you have an option of gender for Siri’s voice.

NOW, here’s the important stuff. Here’s what you can use Siri for to make your life more efficient:

SPORTS
Ask Siri for baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer scores as well as schedules, rosters, and stats.

EATING
Ask Siri to search for restaurants or bars using different criteria. Siri will give you results based on these as well as photos, reviews, and reservations.

SOCIALISING
Siri can post to Facebook for you as well as on other people’s pages.

Siri can also tweet for you.

You can also search for recent tweets. Say, ” What is person’s name/company/brand saying?”  and Siri will show you their most recent Tweets.

LAZINESS

With iOS 7, you can ask Siri to open apps. Just say something like “Play Angry Birds” or “Open iPhoto.” You can even say ‘Take a picture.’ Although Siri won’t actually take the picture for you, she’ll just open the app for you.
Use Siri to turn Bluetooth and other settings like WiFi on and off simply by saying, “Turn Bluetooth/WiFi  Off/ On.”

ORGANIZATION

Tell Siri when and where you want to be reminded of something.

Schedule meetings. Say who, what, where, and when. Siri puts it on your calendar and sends an invitation to the person you’re meeting with via email.

In fact, Siri can write and send all of your emails or text messages or even organize for you to FaceTime with someone.

Use Siri to set the Alarm Clock for you.

Lastly, for Part one of All About Siri, we give you one of our favorite Siri features: What planes are above right now?

Stay tuned for Part Two so you’ll know how to use Siri to make your life more efficient!  Until then, here’s some Siri inspired humor, just for you guys.

Images courtesy of Hapshirecatteries.co.uk, Imgur.com & iPhoneAntidote.

Meet Siri

Is it weird that millions of people around the world know this lady’s voice, and that they communicate with her, sort of, every day without her knowing anything about it?

It’s weird, right?

It’s Susan Bennett’s life. She’s a voice over actress from Atlanta, and has for the first time been publicly identified (by CNN) as the voice behind Siri.

Probably.

“I’m the voice actor who provided the voice of Siri,” Bennett told CNN in an interview, although Trudi Muller, a spokeswoman for Apple, declined to comment.

CNN said an audio-forensics expert “has studied both voices and says he is ‘100 per cent’ certain the two are the same.”

Hi Siri! Thanks for letting people record your answers to our stupid questions from the future!

Super nice of you.

Image courtesy of eonline.com

iOS 7

Yesterday we were given a preview of iOS 7, and apart from the fact that we only saw a teensy snippet of one of our personal favs and the man mainly responsible for iOS 7, Jony Ive, the new iOS announcement exceeded even our expectations. And we had high hopes!

Now, this system update will not change your life drastically, it will not do your job for you or make you a more beautiful person, but what it does is promise to enhance your life, with it’s combination of a pared down and simplified beauty and increased functionality.

This seventh system update is the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone came out with the user interface changing pretty drastically as well as the addition of a number of new features.

As was predicted ( or leaked in a timely manner by Apple), the new iOS has none of the skeumorphic, life like graphics or icons as seen in the previous versions.There is a whole new color palette, completely new icons and the overall impression is a much cleaner, flatter, brighter and simpler user interface.

There is a translucent feel to the screen, which gives depth to the phone, even down to the wallpaper, which you can now see behind app icons, and that moves intuitively in relation to the motion in your hands.The typography, also, has been redesigned to be bigger, spacier and cleaner.

Apple has said that this is the future of iOS, that as well as being the biggest change to iOS since the original iPhone, it is a new beginning.And, well, we haven’t tested it out yet, but we like the way it looks. We like the new features, and we like the direction Apple is going with it.

Here are some new features that make iOS 7 super, double rainbow exciting.

Control center
Swiping up from the bottom of the device, you can find the all-new control center. This innovation provides quick access to preferences and settings. You will find switches for wifi, Airplay, a flashlight, do not disturb, brightness, airplane mode, and quick music buttons.

Weather, Messages, Calendar

Messages and the Calendar app have both been cleaned up and simplified. The updated weather app has animation representing live weather, (the lightening looked particularly cool) with the ability to see more details such as humidity, and scrunch all your favorite places together to see not only the weather in each, but the time in world clock format.

Multitasking

Pressing the power button twice will now give previews of apps that are open, rather than the small app icons that we see right now on iOS 6.

The phone will intuitively learn which apps you use most often and at what time. Background processing will then provide updated content, ready and waiting for the time that you use them.

This also applies with apps that send push notifications- when that happens, the phone will start processing updates because it knows that you will more than likely be opening that app soon.

The phone will recognize and take advantage of power efficient times, such as when it is connected to Wi-Fi, to update apps.

Airdrop
This is a new function, sadly only available on the most recent devices ( iPhone 5, iPad etc).

Airdrop makes it super easy to share photos, videos, contacts and other stuff between friends with iPhones. Connecting via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, you can simply click the share button and choose the recipient from those around you.

You can send whatever you want ( from apps that support Airdrop) and the person receiving can choose to save the item- it will then be located in the appropriate app. Photos in iPhoto, etc.

Safari

Safari is updated with a new full screen look and smart search tab, one tap access to favorites and better parental controls.

You also have the ability to see and browse your tabs from other devices.

Also… and this is kind of a biggie… no more eight tab limit! Oh my god apple, why did that take so long, but thank you, thank you.

Tabs are also now organized differently- vertically in 3D instead of horizontally, with the ability to reorder the tabs. To get rid of one tab you just swipe it to the left.

Photos and camera

The camera app now includes 4 camera options- Normal, square cropped, video and panoramic. You also have the option of a number of live filters to apply to photos.

The photos app has a brilliant way of organizing your photos using time and location to bundle your photos into ‘moments’, which are photos from the same time and/or place. These ‘moments’ can then be organized into ‘collections’, which are groupings of moments using that same organizational information.

You can also view your whole collection via year, see what locations you were in for each year, and scrub to find a specific photo.

Siri

Siri now has not one but two new voices, a more human like female and male voice!

A new interface, with sound waves to represent Siri when he/she’s processing, French and German capabilities and a whole whack load of higher intelligence makes Siri exciting again.

The results can now include photos within the app and has the ability to answer more questions more intelligently, with Twitter, Wikipedia and web search results from Bing integrated into the app. Interesting choice with Bing, but we’ll ride with it for a while…

Siri itself has also become more integrated into your device, and can perform functions such as turning the brightness down, turning Bluetooth on etc.

New app store
For starters, the new app store looks way better. Secondly, all of your apps will now update automatically, (down with those little red numbers!) and thirdly, we now have some new search options.

You will be able to search for apps based on your location, or or an event or festival you’re at. You can also now search for and find apps using age range, which is designed with kids in mind.

Itunes Radio
We have a whole other section on iTunes Radio, go here to read it ☺

Ios in the car
iOS will soon be integrated into your car by having your device display through the in-car monitors. A bunch of cars will begin to be integrated with Siri, Maps, messages and more in 2014.

The introduction to this was pretty broad, however there will be more details to come. The car manufactuors who will be including iOS in at least one of their models include Honda, Mercedes- Benz, Nissan, Volvo, Kia, Acura, Ferrari, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Opel, and Chevrolet.

OK, so those are the big features. There are also a ton of different, smaller features in iOS 7, like the updated notification centre that can now be accessed from the lock screen, and synced across all of your devices, and the activation lock to try to prevent theft ( no-one can use your iphone unless they know your iCloud username & password.)

We think that iOS 7 is really pretty cool, especially considering that we’ll be getting at least a few more cool features in the hardware component around the same time (Fall this year). What do you guys think?

iOS 7 will be available to the public in the Fall. Demos for iOS 7 are available on Apple’s site- here.

First image courtesy of techradar.com, all others courtesy of Apple.com

You thought a passcode on your iPhone 4S was enough?

So as it turns out, the incredible Siri may have some drawbacks you may not have known about.  Currently, there is a bug on the iPhone 4S, which actually allows for people to still use some parts of your iPhone even with a passcode on it!

Essentially how this works is that even though your iPhone is locked with a passcode, you can still access Siri, and thus are still able to use some aspects of the iPhone.  For most people it is probably not that big of a deal, but if you were to lose your iPhone or have it stolen, that might not be the case.

It is simple enough to change your settings to prevent Siri from being accessed while your iPhone is locked, we’ll go through these settings below.

1) Get Your iPhone

2) Go into the Settings App

3) Choose General

4) Choose Passcode

5) Turn Siri to Off.

That’s it!  Your iPhone should be nice and secure now!