Everything you need to know about Siri, Apple's virtual digital assistant
Siri is a personal assistant with personality -- like having a character from a Pixar character built right into your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or iPad mini. She (or he in some languages) will help you set reminders, make calls, send emails, play music, and much, much more. Still in beta, Apple promises to roll out additional languages and features for Siri as time goes on.
System wide voice-to-text dictation, once exclusive to iPhone 4S, has now been replicated on other iOS devices thanks to a Jailbreak hack called Siri0us. In order to use the dictation hack, you will need to have a jailbroken iOS 5 device. A point to note, the hack does not use Apple's servers, it solely uses the Nuance speech recognition system on device, and it does not provide any of the Siri voice control features.
Siri can now control Plex media playback using the Siri Proxy. In case you missed it earlier, a developer created a SiriProxy to control a thermostat and then made the code available for others to use.
It’s amazing how decades later, Microsoft still doesn’t get it. A feature isn’t just a feature isn’t just a feature. It’s more than the sum of its technology and design. Android had great voice control going back to the Nexus One. But Siri isn’t voice control. Siri is context and relationships and Siri is absolutely personality. That Apple programmed Siri to feel like a Pixar character is what made it engaging and what got the internet to flood itself with screenshots showing hundreds of funny, witty, strange, and engaging Siri moments. It isn’t that Siri can transcribe a text message to Eric, it’s how it does it and how you feel doing it.
Windows Mobile and others had touchscreens for years before Apple debuted the iPhone. Then and now, it wasn’t about the spec but the experience.
Siri can now control third party apps and even open cars thanks to clever developers and the SiriProxy. In case you missed it earlier in the week, a developer created a SiriProxy to control a thermostat and then made the code available for others to use. The SiriProxy stands in between your iPhone 4S and Apple's servers. It then intercepts Siri voice commands. This proxy enables additional commands to be added to Siri's repitoire.
Rene, Georgia, and Seth talk about the future of consumer electronics and the mythical Apple Television, Samsung vs. Sprint ads, top 10 apps for new iPhone users, POP phones and Golla bags, email tips and Siri warnings. This is iPhone Live!
In an interview with Forbes, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie poopoos Apple's Siri intelligent virtual assistant, saying it's nothing Microsoft's TellMe hasn't been doing since the introduction of Windows Phone 7 over a year ago.
You can take these Windows Phones now and you can just pick them up and you can say text Eric and it'll ask you what you want to say and it transcribes it. And say send. You can query anything through Bing by just saying the words. All that is already there.
A developer has managed to get Siri to control his home thermostat. The hack does not involve any jailbreaking but does involve setting up a proxy server which intercepts the Siri commands. This proxy server can then be used to add additional command functionality to Siri.
The popular productivity app Omnifocus has been updated wit the ability to capture reminders created with Siri. When the app is launched, it will grab the tasks in your Reminders app and add them to your OmniFocus inbox. Location-based reminders have also been improved with this update.
This week on iPhone Live we discussed rumors of new Siri functionality coming in iOS 5.1 and what we'd like to see. Seth wanted easy access to settings -- "Siri, turn off bluetooth" "Siri, turn on Wi-Fi". Rene wanted the current services evened out -- "Siri, read email" "Siri, send tweet". I want the ability to launch App Store apps, but what about you?
The guys from Applidium claim to have cracked Siri’s security protocol and it could open the floodgates to third party developers and of course other hardware too. There is a downside, in order to use Siri on one of these other devices; you still need to have a UDID of an iPhone 4S device. A UDID is a Unique Device Identifier and is a 40 character unique number assigned to every iPhone.
