A couple days ago I posted an update to what appears to be a long running, though not necessarily intentional, thread on Siri. Yesterday, while driving to the store, I got a text reminder from my dentist about an appointment next week. When I parked I read the text and called them to reschedule. I […]
Just as I keep track of the status of Pages on the iPad (as compared to the Mac) I also like to check in on the experience of using Siri. I recently browsed through a short thread on the Mac Power Users Forum and was reminded that I’d not written about the Siri experience in […]
I’m just going to say up front that I am a big fan Hey Siri generally, but it’s especially nice when accessed via AirPods and HomePods too. The first version of AirPods were excellent and I ordered them the minute they were available, aesthetics be damned. People joked about how they looked but I wore […]
I’ve been using the public betas of iOS 12 since July and right off something I noticed about the suggested Shortcuts were that the specificity made them mostly useless. Why would I want to resend a message to my sister which I sent 30 minutes ago? No thanks. No, I’ve already viewed that website, I […]
Over the past couple years it’s become a thing, in the nerd community, to complain incessantly about how inadequate Siri is. To which I incessantly roll my eyes. I’ve written many times about Siri and it’s mostly positive because my experience has been mostly positive. Siri’s not perfect but in my experience Siri is usually […]
In a recent episode of his Vector podcast, Rene Ritchie had “voice first” advocate Brian Roemmele. Rene is probably my current favorite Apple blogger and podcaster and Vector is excellent. As I listened to this episode I found myself nodding along for much of it. Roemmele is very passionate about voice first computing and certainly […]
Ah, it’s just a little thing but it’s a little thing I’ve really wanted since learning of a similar feature on Alexa. In fact, I just mentioned it in yesterday’s post. We knew this was coming with HomePod and now it’s here for the iPad and iPhone too. Just ask Siri to give you the […]
I’ve recently written about my hopes for a more proactive Siri. I’ve written about Siri quite a bit over the past couple years and it’s been mostly positive. Frankly, I think “she” is pretty fantastic and I call upon her many times a day. I remember when a friend first showed me his Echo a […]
First, just a few notes about my Siri usage. I use Siri daily, many times a day calling on “her” from every iOS device I own. I’ve always wanted the pervasive, ever present computer from Star Trek. Siri is one of my favorite iOS features. I tend to activate her via a mix of “Hey […]
The Siri team has a great post about the evolution of Siri’s speech synthesis on the Apple Machine Learning Journal: Siri is a personal assistant that communicates using speech synthesis. Starting in iOS 10 and continuing with new features in iOS 11, we base Siri voices on deep learning. The resulting voices are more natural, […]