Speech technology company Nuance, which has been suing Vlingo, said on Tuesday that it is buying the mobile voice-software firm for an undisclosed price.

Of course, now the two firms have nothing but nice things to say about each other.

“Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding,” Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan said in a statement. “As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers.”

It wasn’t that long ago that Nuance was asserting that Vlingo’s vision was a little too similar. In August, a jury in one case found that Vlingo did not infringe on Nuance patents. However, Nuance noted at the time that it had other pending actions against Vlingo that it planned to continue pursuing.

Apparently, Apple’s introduction of Siri has convinced the two firms there are bigger fish to fry.

“Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,” Nuance mobile unit head Mike Thompson said in a statement.

Bygones.

In recent weeks, Apple executives have discussed their vision for the future of TV with media executives at several large companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple is also working on its own television that relies on wireless streaming technology to access shows, movies and other content, according to people briefed on the project.

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Meanwhile, since we’re showing Apple ads, here’s a newish one I hadn’t seen yet, reminding us that Apple still has that Beatles exclusive.

Notice I said “TV industry.”

Most observers and analysts believe that Siri’s voice commands could eliminate the need for those clunky TV remote controls. With the blurring and exponential proliferation of television and Web content, telling your TV what you’d like to watch, instead of scrolling through a nearly infinite number of program possibilities, makes a lot more sense.

But from my perspective, Siri’s greatest impact won’t ultimately be on users, or on device manufacturers (though they certainly risk losing market share to Apple). It will be on the TV industry’s content creators and packagers. Why? Because a voice-controlled television interface will fundamentally disrupt the six-decade-old legacy structure of networks, channels and programs. And that’s a legacy that — until now, at least — has been carried forward from analog to digital.

There’s an important underlying precedent here.

If the Internet can be generalized to have one effect across every industry that moves online, that effect would be disaggregation. Choices go from finite to infinite. Navigation goes from sequential to random access. And audiences choose content by the item far more than by the collection. We’ve gone from the packaged and channelized to the unbound and itemized. Autonomous albums are fragmented into songs; series into clips; and magazines and newspapers into articles and individual photos.

As much as we may think that has already happened with video, it is nothing compared to the great leveling that will occur in the voice-controlled living room. Voice-controlled TV means direct navigation to individual episodes, programs and clips. And it will almost certainly lead to a discernible deconstruction of the network and channel structure — not to mention the decomposition of even the aggregated marketplaces like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube.

Here’s the simple reason: No one is going to sit on their couch and say, “Siri, show me NBC’s ‘Community.’” In a voice-activated world, monikers like “NBC” become useless. They don’t stand for anything meaningful to the consumer. They’re just remnants of a decrepit channel structure that’s unraveling. And, in the end, they’ll simply connote the fast-fading allure of mid-20th century mass appeal.

To be sure, the TV majors will lose much of their ability to realize network effects. Already, you’re hearing less about “lead in” and “lead out.” What you are hearing more about, however, is disconnected videos. A program on YouTube, for instance, will sit on a level voice-controlled playing field with an NBC show, and that field will soon become even more level, because Siri will eliminate the menus that structure the artificial hierarchies of content collections.

So how will we be able to get network effects back in video? Let’s look at four possible ways:

• Branded Content — Players can build a strong brand that stands for something with their audiences. Break.com, Discovery and Oprah are all meaningful and build long-term customer loyalty. (“Siri, show me new TED Talks.”)
• Curation — Brand the collection with a curation strategy so that the curator’s name and stamp of approval means something to the audience. (“Siri, show me Jason Hirschhorn’s latest movie suggestions.”)
• Social — In the fully social world that we expect to see, focusing on the virality of content means you tap the human distribution network and social operating system. (“Siri, show me what videos my friends are watching.”)
• Personal — We’ve already seen the extraordinary value of well-tuned personalized recommendations, with Netflix’s notable prize and other famed stories of the benefits of great recommendations. Increasingly, our own patterns of individual videos and the brands we affiliate with, along with recommendations from friends, will be combined into personalized recommendations we won’t even have to ask for. I have no doubt that Siri will be as good a “Genius” as iTunes is at recommending what else to watch. Ultimately, in the age of data, whoever knows the most about us will be able to give us the best experience.

Beyond disaggregation, personalization is ultimately the most powerful consumer value of digital media. My mother’s TV experience was to walk over to her TV set and turn a dial to select among three channels to satisfy her individuality. But in the next generation, no two people will receive the same recommendations from the millions of content choices available.

Before he died, Jobs now famously told Walter Isaacson, his biographer, that he had finally cracked the TV code. It’s unclear what Jobs meant, what this entailed or what he thought it would lead to in the years to come. So, barring further posthumous disclosure, Jobs’s own predictions of his ripple effects will be a media mystery for now.

One thing that’s clear, though, is that Jobs’s Siri will start the dismantling — or creative destruction — of the TV industry as we’ve known it for the last 60 years.

This post originally stated that Siri was unveiled the day after Steve Jobs passed away. It’s been corrected to reflect that the announcement actually occurred the day before.

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a next-generation media company that is reinventing the media model on the social web. Ben is also author of Digital Quarters, a blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

Ahead of the dinner, Anderson stopped by my office to let me have a peek at his 10 predictions, and we talked them over a bit. All 10 are below, along with some comments from Anderson that emerged from our conversation.

Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”

What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”

As an example, he cites the collaboration between Nuance, the speech software company, and IBM, bringing the Watson computer of “Jeopardy” fame into the area of health care. “For the first time, the idea of evidence-based medicine won’t just be in a magazine article,” Anderson says. “A doctor will be able to pick up his phone and describe four symptoms, and find out what the likely diagnosis is, what the indications are. It’s fantastic.”

So here are those 10 predictions, with additional comments from Anderson:

1. TV becomes the new center of gravity in the tech universe. All the other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy. Microsoft’s attempt to integrate Kinect into TV is a strong if qualified success. Smart phone-TV integration software becomes a new category. Pad-TV integration becomes common.

“Apple will hustle to launch the next version of Apple TV, and it will be a roaring success and be seen as Tim Cook’s first great product success. But what it really will be is Steve’s last product.”

2. 2012 will see tectonic shifts in phone markets. “Nokia will fail to come back, which is pretty clear to everyone except the people in Finland.” Samsung, Anderson says, will retain its spot as the new global leader in mobile phones by volume, and will keep this crown despite the debut of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Meanwhile, Anderson says, Google will lose control over the Android operating system, mainly because unlicensed versions of Android will multiply in type and in installed base, especially in Asian countries. “It’s already a balkanized environment. Now Google loses control of the technology entirely. China is already running an unlicensed version of Android, and I think there will be more of that.”

Finally, the smartphone will finally emerge as the dominant category of wireless phone. “Why would you have anything else? And why would sellers of content and services want you to?” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a rich country or a poor country. This stuff is cheap.”

3. Clouds are for consumers, and for start-ups. Even as a large number of big companies move pilot projects onto external clouds, it will become clear that the real trend is for enterprise to stay away from clouds in all key areas, for reasons of both security and reliability.

“The cloud guys hate this because they want to sell to enterprises,” Anderson says. “But the security issues are becoming really intense. If you’re a CIO, it’s a terrible environment, and you’re a target, for sure, especially if you’re a company with a lot of intellectual property. I’m not implying that things like SAAS (software as a service) aren’t a big trend. But no one is going to put their valuable IP on the cloud.”

4. Security splits the tech world in two, finally getting attention from CEOs. Companies with real IP start to realize they have to “go big or go home” with their security response, and their spending on protecting their “crown jewels” rises dramatically.

5. Siri stuns the world. Siri, on Apple’s iPhone 4S, has sounded the arrival of Internet personal assistants, and the world will spend this year marveling at what Siri and its rivals can and cannot do — and what they can learn to do.

“I think we’ll see a bunch of these things,” Anderson says. “Siri will get much better. It will learn how you learn. We’ve never seen people have long-term relationships with machines before, but it will be a long-term relationship, and she will remember everything, but make good use of it. She will know you learn better by seeing than hearing, or that it takes three times to tell you something. All those things that you have to program today should be learnable. None of that has been done yet. That creates a real friendship. And I think we’re going to start seeing personal assistants not just for everyday life, but for professions like medicine or car repair. Instead of just having Siri be everything, there will be many Siris for different contexts.”

6. We enter the amazing world of Dave and HAL, as voice recognition comes of age. From hospital to car, mobile to home, Kinect to Siri, exercise to play, work to entertainment, remote control to direct action, from Microsoft to Apple, from Tellme to Nuance — the time has come for computers and humans to talk to each other. With lots of funny stories, big bloopers and amazing breakthroughs, humanity at the end of 2012 will be talking to machines in a normal voice, and it will not seem unusual, nor be the cause of unending frustration.

“The voice-recognition part is almost trivial,” Anderson says. “The important part is context-sensitive understanding. It used to be that all the researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to think that all you needed was more computing horsepower to do better at voice. It turned out that was wrong. It was right for a little while, but the real problem is context. And so, if you can build up that database where you can search it contextually for what to expect, that is where you get all the mileage.”

7. E-readers prosper, but pads continue to dominate what Anderson calls the “carry-along” market. Pads and tablets will come down in price and get closer to prices of e-readers. Meanwhile, Anderson says, Amazon’s Fire will move upmarket and evolve into a full-fledged tablet.

“If you look at the specs on the Fire, it’s a tablet, but it’s hobbled,” Anderson says. “So I think that this is part of the whole strategy: Come in and sell at a low price, and then later unveil a more complete tablet. Apple will stay ahead, though. A lot of people are asking me if Amazon will catch Apple, and the answer is no. The way it’s configured right now, there’s no way the Fire will catch up with the iPad.”

8. The consumption world explodes. Get ready for new devices, new content, new bundles, new connection techniques, new distribution channels, new aggregators, new tablets, new phones, new players, new self-published authors, new garage bands, new consumption models riding on social networks. There is nothing but high energy in the content consumer market. People are now ready to spend subscription money, and the publisher response will be huge. “It’s going to be a huge melee of stuff,” Anderson says. “We’ll invent more stuff to consume, and it will be very hard to figure out who the players are from week to week, and how they’re doing. They may not even know themselves.”

9. Governments and corporations focus on intellectual property as though it were their most prized asset. It is. This new global understanding leads to a reevaluation regarding giving critical IP away for nothing versus protecting it. The age of what Anderson calls “IP naïveté” is over, and the question of proper IP valuation is here.

What is IP naïveté? “When Jeff Immelt stood on the steps of the White House the day after he was named jobs czar, and handed the plans for GE’s most important jet-engine project to Hu Jintao in order to get the permission to be allowed to bid on maybe selling engines to China — that’s IP naïveté,” Anderson says. “Thinking that’s not going to come back and show up for sale in Houston from some Chinese company in about six months is IP naïveté.”

During 2012, he says, companies and countries will start valuing their intellectual property not for its replacement value, but for figures that are magnitudes larger. State-sponsored IP theft will shift from being considered a nuisance and more along the lines of an act of aggression.

10. Amazon gets it all. Between outdoing Wal-Mart online, to beating the booksellers and delivering groceries, and making new inroads in video streaming, Amazon will prove that one company can indeed have it all. Strong Kindle and Fire sales will only be icing on the cake.

The Macintosh TV

A new iMac with integrated TV functionality.

That’s the latest speculation from Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair, who believes there will be a step between the Apple TV and the Apple Television.

“We believe Apple’s redesign of the iMac in the first half of 2012 will likely usher in some … TV capability into the iMac offering first, effectively taking the high end and larger screens of the iMac line and pushing it toward the TV market by integrating Apple TV and iCloud features into a slimmer all-in-one PC,” Blair writes. “Apple could effectively start with what they already have on the manufacturing line and slowly push their offering from 27 inches and scale up from there to 32 inches and then move on to the 42, 50 and 55 inch market.”

Blair figures these new iMacs would behave like Apple TVs, streaming movies, TV shows, photo slideshows and more to newer Wi-Fi-enabled televisions and providing them access to content stored on iCloud as well.

It’s not an outrageous idea, particularly as an interim step on the way to a true television set. Or as a good reason for consumers to abandon their current TV sets in favor of iMacs. This would be particularly compelling if Apple was able to persuade the cable companies to stream their content though the Apple TV interface. Add to that AirPlay mirroring on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, voice navigation via Siri, and integrate it all into a 42-inch or better screen, and and you’ve got a pretty good reason to watch TV in your office. Or mount your PC on the living room wall.

Of course, Apple has been down this road before, first with the ill-starred Macintosh TV and then with its Front Row media center program, which was abandoned with the launch of Lion.

The company may not be interested in traveling down it again, particularly these days, when it seems so focused on disruptive changes. If Apple hews to that strategy for its HDTV, there will be no interim step. Just a single big announcement intended to upend the industry as we know it and send the competition scrambling.

“Most of the things I’ve done have been made possible by the fact that I can pretty much do what I want,” he said during a keynote talk at Xconomy’s 6×6 forum Thursday in Boston.

Wolfram launched the software company in 1987. Its main product is Mathematica, a computational system used for everything from analyzing flight safety to managing hedge fund trading. Wolfram has also developed search engine WolframAlpha, which is used by the iPhone’s Siri technology.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.

— Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie says Apple is late to the game with Siri
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111123/qotd-and-its-called-microsoft-bobbi/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111109/amazon-has-acquired-yap-the-closest-thing-to-a-siri-clone-it-can-find/ http://allthingsd.com/20111109/amazon-has-acquired-yap-the-closest-thing-to-a-siri-clone-it-can-find/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:34:27 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=142469 There are a lot of similarities between Amazon and Apple. The secrecy, the dedication to the consumer, the focus on devices and digital media, and now this: Siri.

Amazon has not returned calls or emails seeking comment, but we have confirmed independently that Charlotte, N.C.-based Yap has been acquired by Amazon.

Reports of the acquisition surfaced earlier today after CLT, a Charlotte-based blog, connected a couple of obscure dots. First, it tracked down an SEC filing that shows that as of Sept. 8, Yap was acquired by Yarmuth Dion. Then, it discovered that Yarmouth Dion has the same mailing address as Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Media reports immediately jumped to the conclusion that Amazon was interested in the company’s speech recognition technology so it could compete with Siri, the voice-controlled assistant found on Apple’s newest iPhone.

And, from what we dug up, that sounds about right.

Most recently, Yap’s servers were being used by Sprint and others to convert voicemails to text. It was being shipped on a majority of Sprint’s Android handsets. Yap also had an iPhone app.

On Oct. 20, Yap voicemail was discontinued.

But the company, founded by brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, started out in a different direction. Four years ago, the company was eager to build technology that allowed people to interact with Web services using speech recognition. The company, which raised about $10 million, presented at the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

At the time, the idea was a little far-fetched.

Wireless networks weren’t very fast, not many people owned smartphones and distribution was tough because of the lack of app stores. With many of those problems resolved, we heard the 50-employee company was beginning to return to its roots. Now, it works for Amazon.

We can hear it now:

– “Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?”

– “Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.”

– “Yap, what’s the new hit song from Justin Bieber?”

Apple’s personal assistant, which debuted on the iPhone 4S, shows the qualities one wants in an assistant. What she lacks in know-how and dependability, she makes up for by being whip-smart, a quick study and even a bit of a wiseass.

Google’s Andy Rubin may be publicly dismissive, but both Google and Microsoft also know that voice will be the key input method in the future — especially on the phone, with its touchscreen keyboards, even the best of which are still a pain today.

Siri already shows flashes of brilliance. While the assistant app only does a handful of tasks, one can ask those to be done in almost any construction and she will hammer away. Ask her the weather and she will tell you; ask how hot it is, or whether you need an umbrella or sunscreen, and she will tell you that as well.

It is only a matter of time before Apple expands her repertoire to handle more tasks. The company said as much during the announcement of Siri, saying she would be slapped with a beta tag until she finished her training and her foreign-language requirement.

In the meantime, Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in speech, as well. Microsoft spent a fair chunk of change buying Tellme a few years back, and has been working to make it a key component of Windows Phone and the Kinect, among other products. Google, meanwhile, has already built a series of “voice actions” into Android, and one can expect it to expand those efforts.

That said, Apple would be well-served to get its servers performing better. Siri has been frequently inaccessible since her launch. And while everyone likes a smart assistant, those who can’t reliably fetch coffee can find themselves quickly unemployed.

Reports started cropping up around 11 am PT from users around the U.S. saying that Siri — which, to be fair, is still in beta — was unable to connect to its servers to complete searches. The problem appeared unrelated to geography or carrier, but seemed to be affecting significant numbers of users intermittently.

While I was able to compose and send a few text messages through Siri, it was unable to complete any tasks that required searching the Web for information, like answering the queries “What’s the weather like in Paris?” or “What’s Apple’s stock trading at?”

Apple has not responded to requests for comment.

One final thought: Siri’s error message in cases like these should always be “I’m sorry, I can’t do that right now, Dave” — regardless of user. What a missed opportunity for more “2001” high jinks.

If I buy an iPad 2 that includes Verizon or AT&T service do I need a contract, and will this allow the iPad to be used as a cellphone?

A:

The Verizon and AT&T plans for iPads are month-to-month deals, not long-term contracts. You can choose never to activate them, or to turn them on and off based on your needs. These plans are for data only, however. They don’t endow your iPad with cellular voice calling capability. More information is here.

Q:

What is the PC equivalent to a MacBook Air? I’m tempted to get an Air but virtually everything I have is on a PC.

A:

There’s a new type of Windows laptop generically called an Ultrabook that’s aimed at emulating the MacBook Air’s speed, lightness and battery life. I haven’t reviewed them yet, so I can’t recommend one. But two examples are the Acer Aspire S series and the Lenovo IdeaPad U 300s.

Q:

Is the Siri on the iPhone 4S different from the Siri app I downloaded awhile back on my iPhone 4?

A:

Apple bought Siri soon after the original small company launched that app. Apple decided to incorporate it into the phone’s base software. There are some differences, but the functionality is similar. However, the old Siri app is no longer available, and, if you have it, you can no longer connect to the servers that make it work.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

While Siri still has a way to go if it is to popularize voice as the next major user interface, its natural-language processing and automation abilities are already good enough to be a real competitive advantage for Apple in the mobile market.

It’s pushing competitor costs up, as rivals scramble to come up with equivalent voice command offerings — not a cheap or easy feat, considering the level of Siri’s applied artificial intelligence and speech comprehension.

And better than that, it’s creating a consumer bias towards the 4S, Apple’s newest iPhone and presumably the one with the highest margins.

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu says his latest checks with industry and supply chain sources show broad sales strength across Apple’s entire iPhone portfolio, but most of all for the 4S. Evidently lots of folks who could be spending $99 on the iPhone 4 are opting to fork over another $100 for the 4S — and a lot of them are doing it for Siri.

“Despite global macroeconomic headwinds, Apple continues to defy conventional wisdom with a higher-end product mix,” Wu says. “Talking to industry sources, what’s driving the 4S is better than expected reception of its new Siri software.”

The reason for that? Siri’s voice recognition actually works — and pretty consistently, unlike competing solutions, which are often unreliable. And as of today, it’s still in beta. So it will certainly get better and more powerful over time. And it will continue to drive sales.

To wit, Wu’s forecast for the December quarter, which we’re only about a third of the way through: 26 million iPhones — a new record.

Apple seems to like to cut off the heads of all adults — kids appear to be spared the semi-beheadings — in these latest ads for its new iPhone 4S featuring the Siri voice control feature.

So, Siri: What is up with that — and the creepy “Halloween” style music that goes along with it?

I get that it is all about focusing on voice, but it still looks odd.

Oh, just watch, even if you have half a brain (I also added the video of the previous ad):

Dag Kittlaus — the co-founder and CEO of the company that created the Siri voice control feature, which Apple launched to much acclaim recently — has left the company, according to sources.

There were several reasons for the departure, which was amicable and has been planned for a while, sources said. They included Kittlaus’s family being in Chicago, a desire to take time off and an interest in brainstorming new entrepreneurial ideas.

Kittlaus has led the speech recognition efforts for Apple since Apple bought Siri in April of 2010. He had been Siri’s CEO since 2007. Before that, the Norwegian-born Kittlaus was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Stanford Research Institute and had also worked at Motorola.

Kittlaus apparently left just after the launch of the iPhone 4S, in which Siri’s speech recognition technology was the highlight, but sources said other key execs from Siri are expected to remain at Apple.

I have queried Apple PR and am waiting for a response.

Here is a video of Kittlaus demoing Siri at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in 2009:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111023/exclusive-siri-co-founder-kittlaus-departs-from-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111019/android-chief-says-your-phone-should-not-be-your-assistant/ http://allthingsd.com/20111019/android-chief-says-your-phone-should-not-be-your-assistant/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:30:21 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=134082 Andy Rubin thinks there is a lot of potential for phones to be more useful companions, but says he is not interested in turning Android devices into personal assistants.

“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant,” the Android chief said in an interview on Wednesday just after appearing on stage at AsiaD. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”

Of course, several million people have already gone out and bought the iPhone 4S, which has as one of its chief selling points the voice-controlled assistant known as Siri.

Rubin said the jury is still out on whether people will take to talking to their phones to control them.

“To some degree it is natural for you to talk to your phone,” Rubin said, but historically that has meant talking to another person. As for talking to your phone without actually trying to connect to another person, Rubin says he’s not so sure. “We’ll see how pervasive it gets.”

Rubin noted that one of his Android co-founders, Rich Miner, had a cellphone speech company called Wildfire, while General Magic also pursued the idea.

“This isn’t a new notion,” he said. “In projecting the future, I think Apple did a good job of figuring out when the technology was ready to be consumer-grade.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111019/android-chief-says-your-phone-should-not-be-your-assistant/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111019/googles-rubin-says-ice-cream-sandwich-is-filled-with-butter/ http://allthingsd.com/20111019/googles-rubin-says-ice-cream-sandwich-is-filled-with-butter/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:17:13 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=134049 It turns out that ice cream isn’t the only dairy product the Android team has been working on.

The big focus with the new version of Android was on improving the user interface, Google’s mobile chief Andy Rubin said in an interview on Wednesday. That interface, which builds on the holographic look that debuted with Honeycomb, was designed to be like butter.

“We want everything to be smooth as butter,” Rubin said. In addition to the new look, Rubin said the software includes all kinds of other features, from being able to control music from the lock screen to allowing developers to tap the phone’s graphic processor for image-intensive tasks.

The other big goal of Android 4.0, of course, was to unify the tablet and phone versions of the operating system. Google offered the first look at Ice Cream Sandwich on Wednesday at an event with Samsung, where the two companies announced the Galaxy Nexus, which will be the first device running the new software. Other devices will follow within weeks after that one, Rubin said.

While Andy Rubin is most focused on getting Android running on as many phones, TVs and tablets as possible, he sees opportunities well beyond that.

Already, he notes, the operating system has spread to watches from Motorola and car dashboards from Mercedes.

“Tell me what screen Android shouldn’t be on,” Rubin said, speaking to AllThingsD just after he finished his onstage appearance at AsiaD in Hong Kong.

Virtually any screen can be better if it is running Android, he insists. There are actually only two screens where Rubin says he doesn’t want to see Android: Nuclear reactors and weapons systems. (And the licensing terms already prohibit those, he notes.)

I’ll have more from my interview with Rubin, including his thoughts on Apple’s Siri, in a follow-up post shortly.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111019/googles-rubin-says-ice-cream-sandwich-is-filled-with-butter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111017/how-siri-really-works-comic/ http://allthingsd.com/20111017/how-siri-really-works-comic/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 23:30:26 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=132763

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111017/how-siri-really-works-comic/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20111017/siri-google-translate-make-good-companions-on-streets-of-taipei/ http://allthingsd.com/20111017/siri-google-translate-make-good-companions-on-streets-of-taipei/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:00:09 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=132735 Slated to wander around Asia for the next two weeks, I thought it would be a good chance to try out some of the latest in mobile technology.

For a day on the streets of Taipei, I took along an iPhone 4S and the HTC Salsa, a touchscreen Android device with a built-in Facebook key.

The day began with a trip to Taipei 101, the megaskyscraper that towers over the city’s skyline. While waiting to go up to the top, I stopped at the upscale electronics boutique, which featured kiosks for all kinds of brands, from Acer and HTC to Canon and Nikon.

Google’s recently updated translate app — with its expanded speech-to-speech capabilities — allowed me and a companion to query a non-English-speaking salesman about the various differences between two Fuji instant cameras.

“What’s the difference between these two models?” I asked.

The phone uttered something that meant nothing to me, but was clearly understandable to the salesman. After pointing at the screen, I convinced the salesman to respond in Chinese. He said something, and the screen translated that to be “outside.” At first I was confused, but then realized that the only difference between the two models was that one had a slimmer external case.

I also had the iPhone 4S with me. The device got most of its use as my primary camera for the day, capturing everything from the colorful flower memorials at the Lungshan Temple to the sights of Studio A — a computer store specializing in Apple gear.

I also tapped the phone’s maps, and asked for an occasional weather update from Siri, the iPhone’s new voice-controlled assistant.

Missing from Siri’s repertoire, of course, is local search outside the U.S. That meant there was no asking her for help finding the nearest noodle joint, though that wasn’t too hard, anyway.

At the Shilin Night Market, there were iPhone cases everywhere, from ones that made the latest in tech look like an old-school calculator to licensed and black-market models for brands like Paul Frank and Ferrari.

There were also products that stretched the boundaries of good taste, such as a landline phone in the shape of a toilet, and the iBooty — a combination iPhone case and stand in the shape of a derriere. But the products that seemed in poorest taste were the hastily created Steve Jobs memorial iPhone cases.

Still, it was definitely fun looking around and sipping bubble tea.

After a long day, I got home and told Siri to set an alarm for 7 am, which she obligingly did.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling like it was the right thing to do, even though I was talking to a computer.

“I live to serve,” she replied.

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