Siri

There'll be an iPhone 5S and iPhone 6. There'll be a Retina iPad mini. There'll be a thinner, lighter iPad 5. There'll be an Apple A7 system-on-a-chip. There'll be an LTE radio that can do simultaneous voice and data, and eventually voice over LTE. There may be curved displays, biometric sensors and security, 4K AirPlay, onboard voice parsing, in-air gesture and face recognition, and much, much more. Apple's hardware will continue to tick tock its way towards the future, but for mainstream users, most of the time, the devices we hold in our hands today are more than good enough. And it's the stuff inside and around them that's become far, far more important.

Siri is the name of Apple's personal digital assistant. It's basically voice control that talks back to you, that understands relationships and context, and with a personality straight out of Pixar. Ask Siri questions, or ask Siri to do things for you, just like you would ask a real assistant, and Siri will help keep you connected, informed, in the right place, and on time. You can even use Siri's built in Dictation feature to enter text almost everywhere by simply using your voice.

Siri and Dictation are online services, which mean they need a network connection (Wi-Fi or 3G/4G) to work. Siri is also still in beta, so not all features are available in all places or all languages yet. However, with iOS 6, Apple has added even more functionality to Siri, including support for the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPod touch 5, iPad 4, iPad 3, and iPad mini.

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Apple has launched a new status page for it’s stores, services like iMessages and Siri ,and iCloud that is far more granular and informative than the previous version. While the old page was simply a list of status messages pertaining to iCloud, the new page contains a board with a section each for Services, Stores, and iCloud. An indicator, either a green square for ‘Normal’ or yellow triangle for ‘Issue’, gives the status of each individual service, such as iMessage, Siri, or Mail.