Siri

In what appears to be a new feature in the latest iOS beta, Siri explains Conversation Awareness the first time it is activated.

Without the message, people might be confused as to why the volume has suddenly reduced itself on their Airpods Pro 2 …

Disabled people who rely on Apple’s accessibility features say that Voice Control has fallen behind Siri in both accuracy and capabilities, despite being an essential rather than a nice-to-have.

They say it’s frustrating to see the Cupertino company continue to make improvements to Siri, while Voice Control – which is key to many disabled people being able to use Apple tech – has apparently been forgotten …

Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant, which was introduced in 2014 back when Windows Phone was still a thing. Similar to Siri, Cortana lets users perform a number of tasks using voice commands. But it seems Microsoft is giving up on its old virtual assistant, as the latest Windows 11 update kills the Cortana app. The reason? The company will now bet on AI instead.

In July, we heard from Mark Gurman that Apple is internally testing a generative AI chatbot and that the company may make a “significant AI-related announcement” in 2024. Now, the latest analyst note from Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that generative AI features may not come to Apple hardware for consumers next year.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Apple had been internally testing Siri support in Hebrew for the HomePod with iOS 16.4 – and there was even a video of the new language in action on a HomePod mini running an internal beta build. Now with iOS 16.6 and tvOS 16.6, Apple is officially rolling out Siri in Hebrew for both HomePod and Apple TV.

News that Apple has developed its own generative AI model – dubbed Apple GPT – caused a little flurry of excitement yesterday, with John Gruber noting that it caused AAPL’s stock price to briefly spike by 2.7%

Even investors seemed to quickly realise that the news doesn’t mean much, however, as most of that gain was lost by the end of the day …

This week, Apple released the third beta of iOS 17 to developers, and while the update doesn’t add any major features compared to previous betas, it does come with some minor changes. One of those is the addition of new voice options for Siri in German.

It’s been a while since iOS users have been able to ask Siri to send a message to someone. And while this command uses iMessage or SMS by default, it also works if you specify a compatible third-party app. With iOS 17, Apple is making this even more intuitive with a new option that lets users change which app will be used to send a message through Siri.

ChatGPT for iOS has been given an update, adding support for both Siri and Shortcuts. It also now allows drag-and-drop for the first time.

In other ChatGPT news, the unreliability of the AI’s output has been highlighted a number of times, including its propensity to make up citations – and that has now gotten the chatbot into legal trouble …

Since iPhone 6s, users can talk to Siri hands-free just by saying the command “Hey Siri.” This command was later added to pretty much every Apple device, and became crucial for HomePod – Apple’s smart speaker. But now with iOS 17, macOS 14, and other updates, users no longer need to say “Hey Siri” to talk to the viral assistant.

Earlier this year, Apple added dozens of new jobs focused on engineers and scientists working with artificial intelligence. To spice things up further, the company recently added a new job opening to its website – this time specifically looking for software engineers with knowledge of generative AI and mixed reality environments.

Back in 2020, Apple launched its handy intercom feature for HomePod and HomePod mini. Fast forward to 2023 and that feature isn’t yet native on Sonos speakers. Now Soro For Sonos has received an update that brings intercom capability and more.

There’s been much speculation about Apple AI plans, as the Cupertino company has so far kept a low profile while both Google and Microsoft dive into generative artificial intelligence in a big way. CEO Tim Cook didn’t shed much light when asked about it last week, saying only that AI is “certainly interesting” but there are “a number of issues with the tech.”

The seriousness of those issues is very much in debate. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak last month joined leading AI academics in calling for a pause in advanced AI development – but two AI pioneers have markedly different views about the risks …

Apple has been facing a lot of criticism from users and even some of its employees for lagging behind when it comes to Siri. As the company announced its Q2 2023 results on Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook praised the potential of AI but, at the same time, said that there are “issues that need to be sorted.”

A new report from The Information today goes in-depth on the apparent chaos inside teams at Apple working on Siri and artificial intelligence. According to the story, “organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition” have plagued Apple’s efforts to improve Siri and the backend technology that powers it.

This dysfunction has led to Apple falling further and further behind competitors like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, leading some Apple employees to question the future.

Two organizations key to Apple’s history are to be merged into one, as Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has been donated to SRI International. This will see PARC and SRI research teams working together on future projects.

PARC was where Steve Jobs famously saw the graphical user interface and mouse that were used in the LISA and then Macintosh, while SRI was where Siri was developed …

The ability to screen record on iPhone natively dates back to 2017 with iOS 11. Up until now, the feature has only been available via Control Center. But with the iOS 16.5 beta, Apple has delivered the capability to instantly screen record on iPhone with a Siri voice command. Here’s how it works.

iOS 16.5 developer beta 1 doesn’t appear to contain many new features and changes, but there is at least one new feature that will surely make some users happy – the ability to ask Siri to start a screen recording.

Artificial intelligence has been with us for years, even in the little things like identifying the faces in a picture to the recommendations we see in our favorite apps. But more recently, we’ve seen new types of AI capable of doing things unimaginable years ago. This new type of AI is changing how people interact with technology. But at the same time, Apple is clearly falling behind its competitors.

One of the handy capabilities of Siri on HomePod that’s been available since 2018 is Personal Requests. It allows users to make voice commands that deal with what can be more private information from their specific iPhone and iPad. However, as it turns out, Personal Requests are still broken with Siri on HomePod often replying “I’m not sure who is speaking.”