John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Google’s Siri Rival Now Available for iOS

Google has made good on its promise of improved voice search on Apple’s iOS operating system. On Tuesday, the company released a new Google Search app that brings natural language voice search to the iPhone and iPad.

A rival to Apple’s own Siri intelligent agent, Google’s app provides contextual answers to voice queries, along with pertinent Web search results. Those answers aren’t manually curated; they’re simply the Internet’s best guess. But thanks to Google’s Knowledge Graph — a sort of storehouse of semantic-search information — they seem to be generally pretty accurate. During a Monday demo, Google product manager Hugo Barr showed the Android version of voice search correctly and quickly providing information about local movie times and answering questions like, “What is a baby kangaroo called?”

While the app doesn’t have the same system-level integration as Siri, it appears to be well integrated with Google services like YouTube and Maps, ably offering directions to the locations I asked of it and pulling up query-relevant YouTube videos. It’s also very fast. Overall, an impressive effort and one that will certainly keep Apple on its toes.

Here’s a video from Google showing it off:

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work