AllThingsD » Siri

Siri vs. Google Now (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:15:12 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.

Siri Remembers for Two Years

John Paczkowski — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:52:24 +0000

Ever wonder what Siri does with user queries after they’re made? Now, thanks to Wired, we know. Apple tells the publication that it retains user data processed by the personal assistant for up to two years, in an anonymized state. That information, which the company uses to improve the service, is not associated with an Apple ID or anything that might be personally identifiable, and it’s deleted when users turn Siri off.

Icahn Discloses Stake in Nuance

John Murrell — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:00:47 +0000

In an SEC filing Monday, billionaire investor Carl Icahn revealed a 9.27 percent passive stake in voice-recognition firm Nuance Communications, whose technology is reportedly behind Apple’s Siri. The stock had slid 21 percent over the past 12 months, but rose more than 8 percent after hours on the news.

A Smarter Calendar for iPhone

Lauren Goode — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:00:08 +0000

What if the calendar on your iPhone guessed which Starbucks you were headed to for your next meeting, dialed a conference-call passcode for you, and dug up a friend’s address for you so you can send flowers on the day she’s having surgery?

That’s what Tempo does. It’s a free iPhone app made by a Silicon Valley-based company called Tempo AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence.”

When people hear “artificial intelligence,” they may think about robots and other computers that can interpret and mimic human interaction. But some tech companies apply AI to mobile applications that run on the smartphone in your hand. (Think Apple’s Siri, or Google Now. Tempo, like Siri, was created at SRI International.)

Tempo hit the App Store last month, and currently, there’s a “wait list” of more than 20,000 iPhone users who have signed up for the app. The company estimates the wait time to be about a week. Personally, I think it’s worth the wait.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve been using Tempo for the past week and a half. I was intrigued by the promise of a smarter calendar, especially since the iPhone’s native calendar app hasn’t changed much since the smartphone first came out. For the most part, I really like Tempo’s user interface and the way it automatically provided context, like phone numbers, maps or email threads, for the notes I put in my calendar appointments.

There was some room for improvement, though, mainly with inputting new calendar appointments on the fly. On more than one occasion, I turned back to the native iPhone calendar app to enter in new data.

Tempo isn’t the only smart calendar app out there, and others offer some nifty features. Sunrise, for example, inserts the temperature and other weather symbols into your calendar throughout the day. Cue (formerly called Greplin) also includes weather info, but what I really like is how it included upcoming travel at the bottom of the app screen. This week, it reminded me that I have a flight out of JFK next Friday, and it included my airline and confirmation code.

Another iPhone calendar app, Fantastical, is fast, fluid and lets you type quick notes in natural language — “Book massage for Saturday,” or “Call Mom this weekend” — that it will smartly add to the next probable calendar date.

But these have their drawbacks, too. Cue, for one, doesn’t currently have any option for inputting new calendar appointments. And Fantastical costs $4.99 to download, whereas others are free, if you’re looking for a cheap fix.

All of these AI calendar apps require that you link at least a few other accounts — your Contacts, Gmail or Exchange mail, Facebook and more — in order to really work their magic. So if you’re skittish about sharing so much data with an iPhone app, you might still prefer a mobile calendar that just records your meetings and appointments and sends you a standard reminder a few minutes before.

Here are some experiences I had with Tempo that demonstrate what it can do:

It offers quick messaging options straight from the app. Last Monday, when I had a meeting with someone I’ll call Jane Doe, all I had in my calendar was “Hold for Jane Doe” at 1 pm. When I realized I was running late, I opened the Tempo app, and saw that it had already automatically surfaced Jane’s contact info from my phone’s address book. I tapped “I’m Late” at the bottom of the app, and it sent Jane Doe an auto-text-message saying I would be five minutes late. A few minutes later, I tapped “Message” in Tempo to type in my own message: “Coming up now — in the elevator.”

Even when I didn’t enter a full name into my calendar, Tempo still found relevant info for me. A recent reminder in my calendar read: “Stephanie having surgery”. When I tapped on the reminder, Tempo had gathered contact info for four different Stephanies I know. I was able to send a quick note to the correct Stephanie wishing her well, and if I’d wanted to, I could have posted on her Facebook page.

If I wanted to send Stephanie flowers, Tempo had taken the first step toward that, too: It pulled, from an ancient Gmail thread, her home address. My friend was touched that I got in touch. I haven’t told her that an app did a lot of the work for me.

Tempo often pulls email threads into appointments, which is great when you’re getting ready to call someone and need to glance at your most recent email correspondence. However, Tempo indexes new emails only every hour or so, so if someone sent a last-minute email with a change of plans, which happened to me, that wouldn’t show up in Tempo.

I also found the mapping option pretty helpful. I created a calendar appointment for a meeting, and purposely identified the location as just “Starbucks.” When I opened up Tempo, the app had found more than 10 Starbucks near me (welcome to New York City). Tapping on one of the suggested locations quickly brought me to a new page in the app that included a map, directions and the phone number for that coffee shop.

My biggest gripe about Tempo has to do with its design. I kept looking at the app, thinking something else should be there — like a set of arrows to skip from month to month, or a “day” view option at the bottom of the screen when I was in month mode. It turns out you can swipe from month to month, but this wasn’t obvious to me. And you switch from month to week to day mode by tapping the title bar at the top of the app.

When I first starting using Tempo, I got so flustered putting in a follow-up doctor’s appointment at the receptionist’s desk that I resorted to using the native iPhone calendar. I wasn’t alone, either: As a test, I handed my smartphone to a tech-savvy friend and asked him to input a calendar appointment for May. He fumbled with the app for a bit before he figured out the best way to do this.

If you hop on a conference call directly from the app, Tempo also offers the option to dial “1234#” instead of your full passcode for conference call, provided that you’ve put all of the correct dial-in info into the calendar appointment (BlackBerry smartphones have long offered short-cuts for dialing into conference calls, for what it’s worth). I tried this a few times, and each time an automated voice told me that my passcode was not correct.

But this had something to do with the fact that my native calendar still had an outdated conference call number in the notes, and Tempo was pulling in two different numbers to call. After I erased all info pertaining to the old conference-call number, this worked.

Aside from that, Tempo is my new go-to app for reading — and acting upon — calendar appointments.

Apple's Second Samsung Suit Sails On

John Paczkowski — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:07:53 +0000

The Joy of Tech

“I just don’t know if we really need two cases on this.”

That’s what U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh had to say last month about a second patent suit Apple had brought against Samsung. Now, less than a month later, she appears to have reconsidered her position — with a caveat or two.

Late Friday, Koh ruled that Apple’s second suit against Samsung — this one involving alleged infringement of a group of patents, including one related to the company’s Siri voice search technology — can move forward.

Evidently, Koh decided there’s little to gain by postponing Apple’s second suit against Samsung until an appeals court renders a decision on the first. What she did decide was that the case would benefit from a little streamlining. In her ruling, Koh told both companies to “significantly” reduce the scope of the case by trimming down its claims and expert witness testimony.

Welcome news for Apple, which had been pushing aggressively for the case to proceed, arguing that postponing it was injurious to its business. “This case must proceed now in order to stop the ongoing sales — and relentless launch — of Samsung’s latest infringing devices, which have caused, and every day continue to cause, continuing harm to Apple,” the company said in its argument against postponement.

The case is scheduled to go to trial in March of 2014.

Apple's iOS 6.1 Brings Siri-Enabled Movie Ticket Purchases, iTunes Match Update

John Paczkowski — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:34:12 +0000

Apple’s iOS 6.1 is finally out of beta. After months of testing, the company released the latest update to its iOS mobile operating system Monday morning. Version 6.1, which is currently available for over-the-air download via the Software Update option on Apple’s iOS devices, contains a number of bug fixes, and some new features. Among them: Siri-enabled movie-ticket purchases via Fandango, and support for individual song downloads from iTunes Match. Most importantly, this latest point release of iOS adds LTE capabilities to 36 additional iPhone carriers and 23 additional iPad carriers around the world.

Uncharacteristically, Apple announced iOS 6.1’s availability in a press release, complete with an enthusiastic sound bite from SVP of world marketing Phil Schiller, and some metrics for Photo Stream and iMessage. To date, iOS users have uploaded more than nine billion photos to Photo Stream and have sent more than 450 billion iMessages. Those numbers were not mentioned in Apple’s earnings release last week, nor were they discussed on the call.

Facebook Search Could Actually Be Great for Google (Why? Antitrust.)

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:34:36 +0000

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Because it’s barely launched yet and not fully fleshed out, financial analysts are saying today that they don’t see Facebook’s new search product as a big competitor to Google, for now.

But the fact that Facebook has finally made its search intentions known could actually be really good for Google. That’s because regulators — especially those in Europe, who are in the thick of deciding whether to settle with Google over antitrust — now have the prospect of additional search competition to consider.

Google has about 70 percent of the search market share in the U.S., but it has 90 percent of the market in many European countries, where Microsoft’s Bing is not much of a player.

By contrast, people all over the world actively use Facebook — and if those Graph Search queries eventually add up, it could impact the way people view the search market. Social search may be different from general Web search, but if you’re trying to find a restaurant or a dentist or a product, there is absolutely overlap.

Plus, Facebook’s notion of search — which ends in people and pictures and recommendations — lends credence to Google’s defense that modern search is about answers to questions, not simple links to Web pages.

“Facebook’s entry into the search market with a dynamic new product is clear evidence that the search market is competitive,” said Daniel O’Connor, who directs public policy and government affairs at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which includes both Google and Microsoft but leans toward Google’s point of view in the antitrust case. “Facebook is a large, savvy company that clearly thinks that they can cut into Google’s search market share.”

He added, “It gives Google a better hand in negotiations with the European Commission, as market entry is an important consideration in the commission’s antitrust analysis.”

Google has privately told regulators that it was concerned about Facebook’s intentions in search, according to multiple sources close to the situation. Of course, talking up the merits of potential competition is something companies only tend to do when they’re being questioned. Google also talked up Amazon’s strength in shopping, the emergence of Apple’s Siri for voice search on the iOS platform, and even little startups like the privacy-conscious DuckDuckGo.

Facebook’s search launch didn’t arrive in time to factor into the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Google, but Google was essentially cleared on those charges.

Speak Up! Google TV Adds Voice Control.

Peter Kafka — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:00:49 +0000

If you are very old, you’ll remember a time when changing a TV channel meant getting off the couch and actually touching a set.

But in the future, apparently, we’ll just tell the TV what to do. Microsoft’s Xbox already offers voice control, and lots of crystal-ball-gazers figure that Apple TV will do the same, using Siri. Now here comes Google TV, which is rolling out the feature with certain LG TV sets.

Too bad this guy sitting on his couch, by himself, doesn’t seem to be enjoying the process. Perhaps because he has to keep holding the remote to make the thing work. Or maybe he just doesn’t really like TV:

Voice control is cool (sort of), but if you are a future-of-TV nerd, it’s also worth paying attention to the TV guide improvements YouTube talks about in the second half of the video.

Regardless of how you control your TV, guides and curators are going to play a huge role in what you watch. And what Google chooses — or is allowed — to put into those guides will end up being quite important.

Artificial-Intelligence Professor Makes a Search App to Outsmart Siri

Liz Gannes — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:00:31 +0000

Siri, Google Voice Actions and other mobile speech assistant tools have promise, but they often fail to do what we ask them. And so we find ourselves scrolling one-fingered through mountains of messages looking for the right one, or painstakingly copy-pasting addresses into mobile maps.

Nick Cassimatis

A cognitive-science professor named Nick Cassimatis thinks that all these big companies are doing natural language search wrong, and he and two grad students have built their own set of tools — and a start-up called SkyPhrase — to try to show them up.

SkyPhrase today searches Gmail, Twitter and Orbitz, through its own Web site, Chrome extension and iPhone app.

It can search through email for attachments with a query like “emails that Jane sent me during the holidays containing pictures,” do complex Twitter searches like “tweets about Mars from NASA during the last two days,” and find airline tickets with flexible dates like “flights from New York to Orlando leaving next week and returning in November.”

Cassimatis, who is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and got his PhD in artificial intelligence at the MIT Media Lab, says the SkyPhrase approach is more precise because it is more linguistically informed than others.

“We memorize the dictionary to read the Library of Congress,” he said. “Siri is trying to memorize the Library of Congress.”

SkyPhrase is built to understand complex queries and syntactical relationships, not just keywords and commands. It can interpret conjunctions, coordinative clauses and noun phrases.

But there’s still a long way to go. SkyPhrase’s example queries may well stump Siri — as they did when I tried them — but it’s hard to even know what these services are capable of, much less dream up relevant queries in the moment. And the SkyPhrase site and app look more like a tech demo than a polished service.

The company — which has raised some seed funding and also accepts PayPal donations on its site — sells its Gmail search app for the iPhone for 99 cents.

The app does not search within the contents of emails or users’ contact lists, but understands subject lines, sender names, times and attachment types. Users can buy a paid subscription for speech recognition licensed from iSpeech for older iPhones, or just use the built-in speech recognition on newer ones. A free mobile Web version is coming soon, Cassimatis said.

What might be better than a specialized app — and perhaps more fitting, considering the SkyPhrase team’s expertise — is for Siri, Google and other people’s systems to get smarter using these linguistic search techniques. To that end, Cassimatis said he also plans to license a SkyPhrase API.

Apple Breaks the News to Siri (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:46:17 +0000

Sizing Up the New iPad Mini

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 01:06:55 +0000

The iPad has been a true tech phenomenon. Apple has sold 100 million of the tablets in just 2½ years, even though many people doubted they needed a $500 device that’s in between a smartphone and a laptop. No competing model has gained significant traction in the market.

[ See post to watch video ]

Still, there’s been a problem with the iPad. Though it’s much smaller than a laptop, at just 1.44 pounds, and 0.37 inch thick, it can be too heavy to hold for long periods of time, such as when you’re using it to read an e-book. It typically takes two hands to hold. Its 9.7-inch screen, while a pleasure to use, makes it too large to carry without a thought in many purses.

So, on Friday, Apple is introducing a much smaller variant, the iPad Mini, which works exactly like the original and runs all the same apps — the 275,000 tablet-optimized programs plus the rest of the over 700,000 apps available for the iOS operating system the iPad shares with Apple’s iPhone.

The iPad mini weighs just less than 11 ounces, and is only 0.28 inch thick. That’s 53 percent lighter and 23 percent thinner than the standard iPad. It’s 5.3 inches wide versus 7.3 inches for its larger sibling.

In shrinking the iconic iPad, Apple has pulled off an impressive feat. It has managed to create a tablet that’s notably thinner and lighter than the leading small competitors with 7-inch screens, while squeezing in a significantly roomier 7.9-inch display. And it has shunned the plastic construction used in its smaller rivals to retain the iPad’s sturdier aluminum and glass body.

Unlike its two top small tablet competitors, the mini has a rear camera. And unlike the Kindle Fire HD, it offers optional cellular data connectivity to supplement Wi-Fi. It has very good battery life.

However, there are two downsides compared with the leading 7-inch competitors, the Google Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. First, the iPad mini starts at $329, versus $199 for its two main rivals (though the Fire HD costs $214 without annoying ads). Second, it has a lower screen resolution — 1024 by 768, versus 1280 by 800 for the other two.

I’ve been testing the iPad mini for several days and found it does exactly what it promises: It brings the iPad experience to a smaller device. Every app that ran on my larger iPad ran perfectly on the mini. I was able to use it one-handed and hold it for long periods of time without tiring. My only complaints were that it’s a tad too wide to fit in most of my pockets, and the screen resolution is a big step backwards from the Retina display on the current large iPad.

But it’s about 30 percent thinner than the leading 7-inch competitors, the Google Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire 7. And it’s about 9 percent lighter than the Nexus and about 22 percent lighter than the Fire HD. It’s very slightly narrower across than the Fire HD, but about 11 percent wider than the Nexus. I found it easy to hold with one hand, though the width might be a bit too much for some people with smaller hands.

Even though the mini is thinner and lighter than the leading 7-inch tablets, its larger screen provides about 35 percent more room for viewing content like books and Web pages. I found it easy to see and read material on the screen and to tap and swipe. My only complaint was that the keyboard, in portrait mode, felt a bit cramped, though it was fine in landscape mode. (I found that, unlike with the big iPad, it was more common for me to hold the Mini in portrait mode.)

In my harsh battery test, where I play videos back to back with the screen set at 75 percent and the Wi-Fi on to collect email, the iPad mini exceeded Apple’s battery life claim of 10 hours and lasted 10 hours and 27 minutes. That was about an hour better than the Kindle Fire HD, but about 17 minutes less than the Nexus 7.

I found the cameras did a very good job. I conducted several clear video chats using the 1.2 megapixel front camera, and the 5-megapixel rear camera produced very good photos and videos. The stereo speakers sounded good to my ears.

So why did Apple, whose large iPad and new Macs boast extremely high screen resolution, choose a lower resolution for the mini? The company did so because it says there are only two resolutions that allow its tablet apps to run unmodified. One is the extremely high resolution on the current large iPad, which would have boosted the cost and lowered the battery life of the mini. The other, the one Apple chose for the mini, is the same resolution on iPad models consumers have snapped up: The original iPad and the iPad 2, which is still on the market at $399.

This makes sense, but it means that, unlike its closest competitors, the mini can’t play video in high definition. Apple insists the device does better than standard definition, if you are obtaining the video from its iTunes service, since iTunes scales the video for the device, so it will render somewhere between standard definition and HD. It says some other services will do the same. But the lack of true HD gives the Nexus and Fire HD an advantage for video fans. In my tests, video looked just fine, but not as good as on the regular iPad.

The cellular models, which will start at $459, will be available in a couple of weeks.

The $329 price may well tempt some budget-conscious buyers who have lusted for an iPad. But Apple believes the lower size and weight, not the price, are the key attractions.

If you love the iPad, or want one but just found it too large or heavy, the iPad mini is the perfect solution.

Write to Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Google's Siri Rival Now Available for iOS

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 18:12:16 +0000

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:

It's an iStorm: Scott Forstall Out at Apple, Along With Retail Head, as Other Top Execs Get Promotions

Kara Swisher — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 21:10:44 +0000

Big management shifts at Apple are now taking place.

Scott Forstall, the man in charge of its iOS mobile software efforts and a major and longtime executive at the tech giant, is leaving next year and will remain an adviser to CEO Tim Cook until then.

In addition, new retail head John Browett is headed out the door.

As part of the move, Apple noted that four key execs — Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi — would “add responsibilities to their roles.”

Ive gets “Human Interface”; Cue will take over Maps and Siri voice recognition responsibilities; Mansfield will run a new unit called Technologies, “which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization”; and Federighi gets the big job of iOS and OS X.

More to come on what happened, but Forstall’s departure is very big news and a drastic move for such an important player in the tech space.

He had big fans and also many detractors for his sharp-edged personality, as well as what some described as exhibiting “growing open challenges” to Cook himself. Forstall had previously been called “CEO-in-waiting” in one media account in Fortune.

In addition, numerous sources noted persistent tension between Forstall and several other key execs, especially the powerful design chief Ive.

Veiled internal politics at Apple aside, Forstall has been a key part of Apple’s success over the last decade, especially in the development iPad and the iPhone.

Recently, there has been some level of ire at Apple over the troubled rollout of its own mapping software and the replacement of Google’s popular service, which was Forstall’s responsibility. (No, this move does not mean everyone gets Google mapping back, as one person asked me.)

Browett’s leaving is a little less of a surprise. Since he got the job, he has alienated many within the highly successful retail organization at Apple, many sources said.

His departure comes less than one year after the former Dixons CEO was hired by Apple to succeed Ron Johnson, who left for J.C. Penney in November 2011. Recently he’s been criticized by some Apple Store employees for unfriendly policy changes aimed at increasing Apple’s retail profit margins.

More to come, obvi, but here is the official press release from Apple, which it put out with the most understated title of all time:

Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services

Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi Add Responsibilities to Their Roles

CUPERTINO, California — October 29, 2012 — Apple® today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.

“We are in one of the most prolific periods of innovation and new products in Apple’s history,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The amazing products that we’ve introduced in September and October, iPhone 5, iOS 6, iPad mini, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPod nano and many of our applications, could only have been created at Apple and are the direct result of our relentless focus on tightly integrating world-class hardware, software and services.”

Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design. His incredible design aesthetic has been the driving force behind the look and feel of Apple’s products for more than a decade.

Eddy Cue will take on the additional responsibility of Siri® and Maps, placing all of our online services in one group. This organization has overseen major successes such as the iTunes Store®, the App Store℠, the iBookstore℠ and iCloud®. This group has an excellent track record of building and strengthening Apple’s online services to meet and exceed the high expectations of our customers.

Craig Federighi will lead both iOS and OS X®. Apple has the most advanced mobile and desktop operating systems, and this move brings together the OS teams to make it even easier to deliver the best technology and user experience innovations to both platforms.

Bob Mansfield will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization, fostering innovation in this area at an even higher level. This organization will also include the semiconductor teams, who have ambitious plans for the future.

Additionally, John Browett is leaving Apple. A search for a new head of Retail is underway and in the interim, the Retail team will report directly to Tim Cook. Apple’s Retail organization has an incredibly strong network of leaders at the store and regional level who will continue the excellent work that has been done over the past decade to revolutionize retailing with unique, innovative services for customers.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

"Goodnight iPad" Author Back With a Siri Love Story

Ina Fried — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:00:56 +0000

There’s a new book out for everyone who is in a relationship with a woman. Named Siri.

David Milgrim, the author of parody kids’ book Goodnight iPad, has a new book out next month that looks at the complicated love affair between modern Americans and their gadgets.

“Siri & Me: A Modern Love Story” is not the adorable kids’ book that its predecessor was, but it does offer some funny insights into our relationship with technology as it tells its tale. “Siri & Me” is the story of a blogger named Dave and his close relationship with technology and his much more challenging interactions with carbon-based life forms.

Dave has many technology objects in his life — and more stashed in his closet — but Siri eclipses even his robot dog as his chief technology passion. On the human side, Dave’s object of affection is Iris, who has a compulsive need to photograph everything so as not to miss anything.

I am certain I am not the only techie who will see more than a little of themselves in Milgrim’s characters. There are great scenes where everyone is sitting around a table tweeting and updating their Facebook status to let all their “friends” know about their interactions.

And, since, unlike Dave, I haven’t spent all night talking to Siri, I can also feel a little bit superior. Now, to update my Facebook status …

Exclusive: Apple Nabs Amazon A9 Exec Stasior to Run Siri -- But Does Hire Signal a Bigger Move Into Search?

Kara Swisher — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 19:27:41 +0000

Apple has hired major Amazon exec and prominent search technologist William Stasior to run its Siri unit, according to sources.

At the online retail giant, Stasior has been in charge of A9, Amazon’s search and search advertising unit. The former AltaVista exec co-founded the independent company and has run it since Udi Manber left for Google.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based A9 now provides search for Amazon sites worldwide, as well as other online retail sites.

Stasior has an impressive pedigree (you can read his resume and see a really geeky binary image he posted of himself here). The MIT PhD has taught there, too, and has done stints at Oracle, Netcentives and AltaVista. He came to Amazon in 2003 as its director of search and navigation.

He will now be in charge of Siri, which is Apple’s famous voice-activated personal-assistant program. The tech giant acquired Siri in April of 2010 to garner a big stake in voice-activated search.

While Siri has had a high profile in the iPhones, Apple has lost some of the talent who created it. Adam Cheyer, who co-founded the voice recognition software company prior to its acquisition by Apple in 2008, left recently. And CEO Dag Kittlaus departed in October of 2011.

What’s more intriguing is what else Stasior might find himself working on — presumably, strengthening Apple’s search and search advertising technology in the wake of its increasing competition with Google.

Apple has recently tossed Google’s mapping technology from the latest version of its iOS 6 operating system and could eventually remove it as a search option, too, on its popular smartphones and also from its other computing devices and software.

Amazon had no comment on Stasior’s departure.

Open the iPod Touch Bay Doors, Siri

Voices — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 06:59:51 +0000

It’s about an assistant named HAL who tries to make contact with a higher intelligence. These two guys get in the way and mess it all up.

– Apple’s personal assistant app Siri, summarizing the plot of “2001: A Space Odyssey”

Maps Says Sorry (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:05:15 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.

Not Ready for iPhone 5? Upgrade Offers Some New Tricks.

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:03:45 +0000

The good news for plenty of current iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users pondering buying the new iPhone 5 is that they’ll get many of the 200 new features in Apple’s free update for mobile software, iOS 6, available on Wednesday.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve compiled a handful of the most significant features you’ll get with the iOS software update, which I tested on the iPhone 5 and the newest iPad. Some older devices won’t be able to use all of these features and one feature will work only on the iPhone 5: taking a still photo while recording a video. Here are some highlights of the new features. There are many more features too numerous to mention.

Do Not Disturb

Finally, the iPhone can let its owners sleep at night — with options. Until now, the iPhone’s silencing switch turned off all sounds with no alternatives. This meant that people who wanted to turn off alert sounds for Facebook notifications and incoming emails while they slept had to give up receiving phone calls in the middle of the night from, say, a relative having an emergency.

The Do Not Disturb feature (turned on in Settings and adjusted in Settings, Notifications) turns off all sounds but can make exceptions. If you want to be notified whenever one of your favorite contacts calls you, the phone will ring. Another optional feature of Do Not Disturb lets calls ring through if a person calls twice in a row within three minutes. Do Not Disturb can be set to work on a daily schedule, like from 11 pm to 7 am, so you don’t have to remember to turn it on. People who are trying to maintain separate work and personal lives may even set this to work after they leave the office, only allowing calls from certain groups (like family and close friends) to ring between 6 pm and 8 am.

If your phone’s silent switch is on, the phone won’t make noise no matter how Do Not Disturb is set.

The Panorama feature in Camera works on the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and newest iPod touch.

Panorama

In iOS 6, Apple (as it often does) took a feature that’s already available in many smartphones and made it a lot simpler to use: capturing panoramic photos. In Camera, select Options at the top center of the screen and choose Panorama. A small on-screen diagram will appear to guide you as you click the shutter button once and pan the phone from left to right, following an on-screen arrow along a center line. Panorama works on the iPhone 4S and 5, as well as the newest iPod touch.

Better Sharing

IOS 6 has improved sharing in two significant ways: It’s now integrated with Facebook and enables sharing directly from the places where people think about sharing. You can share to Facebook using various tools such as the Notification Center screen (pull this down from the top of the screen and select Tap to Post in Facebook); using Siri (tap and hold the Home button before saying, “Post to Facebook”); or by clicking a share button (a square with an arrow) on nearly any screen — including photos.

Until now, iOS forced people to open Facebook, select Photo in the app and then choose an image to share. Now, people can tap the share button while looking at a specific photo and send that photo out to Facebook.

Likewise, you can now add photos or videos to emails as you’re composing them — not by starting with photos. This is something people naturally do on their desktops as they add photos or videos to emails. Do this by tapping anywhere on the screen in the body of the email to see the Select, Select All, Paste options appear. Then tap on the right arrow and select Insert Photo or Video.

Siri now works on the newest versions of the iPad and iPod touch, and can do more things, like launch apps.

App Store

While Apple’s App Store now holds 700,000 apps, the revamped App Store app for iOS doesn’t look overcrowded thanks to a more organized layout. Search results appear in card format, one per screen. By swiping one app to the left, another appears. Developer information, reviews from other users and screen shots of the app appear in a helpful, methodical format. While the old App Store forced people to scroll down a lot, this App Store makes better use of the horizontal plane. It does a better job of displaying Genius, a feature that suggests apps you might like according to those you’ve purchased.

Maps

Apple is now shipping its own Maps app, replacing Google’s Maps app on devices receiving the update. This app takes some getting used to, and its maps appear a bit more zoomed in, overall.

But its turn-by-turn directions (available on the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 2 or later) will be a big help for people who want a hands-free option for driving: Just plug in your destination address, pick a route and tap start to hear navigation instructions announced out loud as you drive. The text of the directions still appears on the device’s lock screen, in case you put it down and it locks and you need to quickly glance at the next step.

Siri

Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, has been updated to do more and now works on the latest-model iPad and iPod touch as well as the iPhone 4S and 5. Siri can now open apps and do more with them; I composed a Facebook message and never touched any keys. But it still has its inaccuracies: In a quiet office, I said, “Launch Google Plus,” which Siri interpreted as “Lunch Google Plus,” and then said, “I found 15 lunch restaurants, 11 are fairly close to you.” This is a failed experience that happens all too often.

Freedom from Wi-Fi

Now, the FaceTime video chats you make on iOS can be conducted over cellular, not just Wi-Fi. This works on the iPhone 4S and 5, as well as the newest iPad, so long as it has cellular data capability.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Intel's Promise to Reinvent the PC Falls Flat

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 12:00:25 +0000

If you were going to reinvent the PC, what would it look like? Don’t answer until you’ve heard what plans Intel has for it.

Reinventing the PC was the promise that the world’s largest chipmaker made from the stage at its annual Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco on Monday. And if ever there was a moment when Intel needed to generate some excitement, this was it. Last week, Intel slashed its sales forecast for the September quarter, as demand for PCs lagged around the world.

In remarks before an audience made up primarily of product engineers and software developers, Intel’s chief product officer, Dadi Perlmutter, went through a batch of almost-interesting new capabilities for the personal computer, and showed off a handful of designs for new mobile PCs, aimed at dislodging that iPad or smartphone in your hand with something small and light that contains an Intel chip.

There were PCs that were small, PCs that were light, PCs with displays that detached from their bodies, and PCs that folded and twisted over the keyboard. All of them look like reheated concepts from the Tablet PC era circa 2002, their sole physical advantage being that they’re thinner and lighter than before, and touch-ready. Like an iPad.

Then came demos of two features around the personal computing experience from Nuance, maker of the Dragon line of voice control applications — one showing how soon you’ll be able to search Google, tweet and play digital media files with voice commands, a la Apple’s Siri, and the other, 3-D gestures a la Microsoft’s Kinect system for the Xbox. If this was Intel’s idea of generating excitement about the future of the PC, it didn’t work.

And what about Moore’s law? Certainly, the trend in computing power — enabled by the ability to shrink and thus double the number of transistors on a chip every two years or so — first observed 47 years ago by the Intel co-founder would enable some super-awesome new feature set that will make the PCs of 2013 seem quaint and silly and less awesome than PCs from before?

Not so much. Here’s a startling-when-you-think about it fact about Haswell, the code name for the new chip Intel plans to release next year. Moore’s law essentially allows you to make one of two fundamental choices as the transistor sizes on individual chips shrink with each successive generation. You can either build a chip that gets twice as much work done using about the same amount of power as the previous generation. Or you can build a chip that gets the same amount of work done using half the amount of power. Which choice do you think Intel made with Haswell? Same work, less power.

Of course, there are a lot more finely grained details about what Haswell will do (Anand Lal Shimpi has a detailed rundown on its many technical details here). Since mobile devices of every flavor and form factor imaginable are in, concerns over battery life have overtaken raw power on the list of priorities for Intel’s customers, the PC makers. For years, the need was always for more power, and Intel was ready to oblige. Now, computing power is so plentiful on a PC that most routine applications don’t even come close to taking advantage of it all.

And I wasn’t the only one who came away with this impression. At an informal gaggle of chip industry analysts after Perlmutter’s speech, the consensus was that the biggest benefit of Haswell is the improved power performance.

Patrick Moorhead, a former executive with Intel’s main rival, AMD, and now an industry analyst, put it to me in starker terms: “Intel has a week to show that the PC has a bright future over the next five to 10 years,” he said. “It’s all about usage models that can be done on a phone platform with wireless display and peripherals versus a PC platform.”

I don’t know that we’re quite that far along; I still rely on my home PC (okay, it’s a Mac), enhanced by a few external hard drives for backup purposes, to be the central storage and retrieval spot for all my digital stuff — my photos, my music, my videos, and many, many documents. And when I want to get some real work done, I turn first to that machine. The iPad I use to catch up on episodes of “Breaking Bad” and to read The New Yorker. I have a hard time imagining a world were PCs and tablets don’t coexist in most households in a long-term digital symbiosis, but it’s clear that those PCs will be replaced less frequently and will become more marginalized as consumer attention shifts to tablets and smartphones, devices where, at least to now, Intel isn’t strong.

PCs as we know them may in time go out of style, but there’s one thing that Intel can count on: It will still be called upon to build the best and most powerful chips it can for the millions of servers that will be needed to power the cloud-based services all those smartphones and tablets will be using. Battery life doesn’t matter in servers, though the need to use less power in data centers, and thus do more while operating at a lower cost, is always in style. The data center is at least one place where the one thing that Intel does better than anyone else — deliver ever more computing muscle for lower cost on an almost annual basis — will never go out of style.

Siri Co-Founder Adam Cheyer Left Apple in June

John Paczkowski — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:37:14 +0000

Another former Siri executive has left Apple. Adam Cheyer, who co-founded the voice recognition software company prior to its acquisition by Apple in 2008, has left the iPhone maker. Sources in position to know tell AllThingsD that Cheyer resigned back in June to pursue other projects. Cheyer is the second Siri executive to leave Apple in the past year, following CEO Dag Kittlaus, who left in October of 2011. News of Cheyer’s departure was first reported by Bloomberg. Apple declined comment.

Siri, Remind Me to Yank Those Ads.

Voices — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 07:50:49 +0000

Samsung must love them. Why? Because they’re pernicious: they dilute the focus, they detract from Apple products’ own well-deserved and well-earned celebrity.

– Former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée on why he thinks Apple should pull its Siri ads

Nuance's Nina Platform Adds Speech Interface to Corporate Mobile Apps

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:42:56 +0000

If you’ve ever wanted to talk to the mobile banking application on your iPhone or Android device, you soon may get the chance. Nuance, the voice technology company best known for its Dragon Naturally Speaking line of voice applications for personal computers and Dragon Dictation on the iPhone, today announced Nina, a voice platform that’s aimed at enhancing customer-service applications with a Siri-like voice-control interface.

AllThingsD got a demo of the technology last week. It basically brings together what Nuance does well: Speech recognition, text-to-speech, natural-language understanding and voice-ID biometric technology. It has rolled all of these into a hosted, cloud-based service that can be used by banks, insurance companies and other business who make customer service and account-access applications, which can now add all these features into their applications.

Nuance’s approach is to offer a prebuilt Nina virtual-assistant “persona,” a software developers kit and a set of APIs that companies can use to make these applications easier to use. If you can use Siri, then you’ll know what to do with Nina-enabled applications. You’ll be able to use it to pay bills, transfer money between accounts, and other basic things like that.

But here’s a key feature you might not expect: Nina can also use your voice to authenticate you. As part of our demo, we handed the phone around the room and tried to sign in to the demonstration banking app — only one of us could. If nothing else, adding a voice-based biometric option to banking apps would seem to improve the security of a mobile banking app, if only because sufficiently complicated passwords are hard to remember.

An early customer is USAA, a financial services company whose primary customers are U.S. military service members and veterans. Nuance has plans to offer the technology for use in travel, insurance, retail and government apps, as well.

"Google Now" Might Be Google's Most Personalized Feature Yet

Liz Gannes — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:21:31 +0000

The next version of Android will include a smart personal assistant called Google Now that makes assumptions about information users want to find, based on highly personal data like their search history, calendar, location and even location history.

AllThingsD.com

Google Now will come out as part of the new Jelly Bean Android 4.1, which will roll out via an over-the-air update in mid-July.

If it works, this is going to be one of those features that’s totally creepy and totally useful.

For instance, Google Now promises it will figure out when and where a user commutes to work on a daily basis. When the user opens the app at that time, it will display a commute card that computes the current time with traffic and gives a faster route when possible.

Some other examples Google gave today as it debuted the feature at Google I/O:

When a user is located at a bus or train station, a Google Now public transportation card will appear that says when the next buses and trains are arriving.
As a user walks down the street in a new place, Google Now will suggest points of interest.
Once a user searches for a flight, Google Now creates a card for it that is updated with flight status and delays.
Google will also determine what sports team a user is most interested in, based on search history, and show a card of scores and upcoming games.
There are also cards for travel, translation, etc.

Smart mobile personal assistants are a hotbed of innovation right now, with Siri leading the way on iOS, and start-ups like Cue (formerly Greplin) innovating as well. More on that here.

The new Android Jelly Bean also includes some other personal-assistant-style features, such as a way to quickly email everyone attending a meeting to say you’ll be running late, by pressing a button directly from the notification page.

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Greplin Recasts Itself as Cue, an Intelligent Personal Assistant App

Liz Gannes — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 01:49:09 +0000

Greplin, the personal search start-up, is trying to become more helpful and more mainstream with the launch of a new personal assistant app called Cue.

Cue is an app that processes users’ emails, contacts and files. Then it presents a daily agenda, de-duplicates and updates contacts, and surfaces important details from things like flight confirmations and restaurant reservations.

Cue founders Daniel Gross and Robby Walker

(Update: The Cue iPhone app is now available. ~~Cue is not available yet — it’s supposed to come out Thursday~~ — but due to a snafu with a media embargo about the company’s relaunch, I’m posting about it now.)

As a larger topic, I’m really interested in intelligent personal assistants that could help bring context and efficacy to smartphones beyond what Apple’s Siri does today. Besides Cue, some other emerging projects in the space include Happiness Engines and Incredible Labs.

Cue is mostly a mobile app — at first only for iPhones — but it also has a Web interface. It will replace the former Greplin iPhone app, which was similar but more rudimentary.

On the occasion of the launch, Greplin, the company, is giving up its geeky name — “grep” is programming jargon for search — and will now call itself Cue.

The new name “literally means a hint as to what’s next,” as co-founder Robby Walker put it, which is exactly what Cue is trying to offer, by anticipating users’ needs and parsing through all their information to give them what’s helpful and timely.

One Cue feature that may grab people’s attention is a “Running late?” button at the bottom of every calendar item within the app. When the button is pressed, the app helps users automatically text whomever they’re meeting to send an alert. It also assists with things like canceling reservations and automatically pulling up maps to navigate the next location on the agenda.

Cue effectively stands in for a user’s calendar — so it works best for people who already use Google Calendar and perhaps also Facebook events and Basecamp deadlines, which Greplin supports and indexes. Cue sends push notifications about upcoming events, and then when users slide the notification to unlock the phone, they see an overview of where to go, who to call and other pertinent info.

Cue is the kind of app that probably eventually makes more sense at the level of a mobile operating system, where it can bring context and cooperation among all the redundant built-in apps like calendar, contacts and email. But the company doesn’t have those kinds of biz dev deals yet.

What Cue has spent its time on is building infrastructure to process this deluge of incoming personal data, as well as teaching itself to extract entities like receipts, confirmations and invitations and understand people in users’ networks by mapping and overlapping all their contacts and social media identities.

Like Greplin was, Cue at a basic level is free, but costs $5 per month or $50 per year for users who connect their accounts on professional-grade services like Yammer, Salesforce and Evernote.

Cue was co-founded by Walker and Daniel Gross, and was originally part of the Y Combinator program. It has raised $4.8 million from Sequoia Capital and angels including Bret Taylor (the soon-to-depart Facebook CTO and co-founder of FriendFeed), Paul Buchheit (now at Y Combinator, creator of Gmail and also co-founder of FriendFeed), Keith Rabois (of Slide and Square) and Geoff Ralston (former Yahoo exec and education investor).

Apple to Developers: "Get Your Apps Ready for China"

John Paczkowski — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:43:06 +0000

The Chinese market has figured prominently in Apple’s quarterly results for some time now. When the company last posted earnings in April, it reported a record $7.9 billion from Greater China — a 3x increase year over year. As CEO Tim Cook said at the time, “It is mind-boggling that we can do this well.” Indeed, first-half revenue for Greater China topped out at $12.4 billion this year — just $1.1 billion short of what it was for all of 2011.

Given that, it’s little wonder so much attention is being paid to China in the software updates announced at this year’s WWDC. Apple has added a bevy of new features for Chinese consumers to both iOS and OS X, and it went out of its way to note them during the keynote address that kicked off WWDC today.

To iOS 6, Apple has added Baidu as a new built-in search option in Safari. Also onboard: Support for video sharing sites Youku and Tudou and micro-blogging service Sina Weibo. Improved text input has doubled the number of Chinese characters supported in handwriting recognition. Finally, Siri has been updated to understand Mandarin and Cantonese.

To OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has added the above features, with the exception of Siri, along with a few others. There’s a new version of Lookup that supports Simplified Chinese and a new version of Mail that supports popular Chinese email services QQ Mail, 126 and 163.

“The Mac has been growing fantastically well in China,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, remarked during his portion of this morning’s demo. “Get your apps ready for China.”

Wise advice and another big nod to the Chinese market, which Apple clearly views as a massive opportunity.

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