Siri

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV3DlISVfao]

MercuryNews was told by the San Jose Police that using Siri while driving is illegal. The San Jose Police Luitenant said that the actual act of talking to Siri isn’t illegal, but it’s the part when you use you’re hands to navigate through its functionality when things start getting setup for a nice ticket.

“It’s legal to talk to Siri, as long as the phone’s not in your hand,” says San Jose police Lt. Chris Monahan. “But if you have to push the phone to activate her, or if you ask for directions and she puts them up on her screen for you to read, then California’s hands-free law says your’re breaking the law.”

Where it gets murky is that the iPhone is also a GPS device and it isn’t illegal to use your fingers to use GPS devices, especially one that is mounted to your dashboard. Let’s just say: keep it safe.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5LGxDQVXew]

As we tweeted last night, Conan adds some flavor to the original.

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When iOS 5 came out, Google got caught with its pants down because for most users Google Voice wouldn’t even start up without crashing.  We’re not certain what the Voice team was doing during that beta testing window (maybe the last minute Siri inclusion threw things off?)

All of that is water under the bridge right now because Google Voice is back in the App Store and works great on iOS 5.

What’s New in Version 1.3.1.1891

Fix for sign in crash introduced in v1.3.0.1771.

Next step iPad version?
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Yesterday we posted a story about the possibility of new features being implemented in a future update to Siri. However, if you don’t feel like waiting, today the guys over at Techland have put together some tips and tricks for getting the most out of Siri and accomplishing tasks that aren’t currently built-in.

While text message charges will of course apply, here are a few tips for updating Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ by redirecting them through SMS. You can head over to Techland for many more Siri related tips and tricks including searching with Bing and Yahoo!, dictation tips, and how to “teach Siri hard-to-pronounce names”.

For Facebook:

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPuYWwBDHHQ]
AT&T just issued a press release saying they activated one million iPhone 4S units, or one-quarter of the four million devices Apple sold during the launch weekend. It’s the most successful launch in AT&T’s history, the company wrote in the release:

AT&T today announced it activated more than 1 million iPhone 4S’ as of Tuesday, making it the most successful iPhone launch in the company’s history. AT&T was the first carrier in the world to launch iPhone in 2007 and is the only U.S. carrier to support iPhone 4S with 4G speeds. “It’s no surprise that customers are clamoring for iPhone 4S and they want it to run on a network that lets them download twice as fast as competitors’,” said Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO, AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets. AT&T’s speed advantage, and the unique ability to talk and surf at the same time, has been roundly praised by industry pundits.

About those “4G speeds”…

AT&T is reportedly pushing Apple to put a “4G” cellular icon on iPhone 4S to represent its faster Internet connection, which theoretically hits 3G HSPA 14.4 Mbps speeds (lawmakers wouldn’t approve of that). The carrier also released a customer testimonial video, included above, with people explaining why they opted for an iPhone 4S on the AT&T network (hint: because it’s “super-fast”).

Taking into account September quarter earnings, iPhone 4S sales in just a few days since last Friday’s launch hit nearly one-third of the 2.7 million iPhones activated in the last quarter which was down from the 3.2 million iPhones from the year ago September 2010 quarter (which included the iPhone 4 launch).

Note that this is one million iPhone 4Ss only, excluding the newly price-reduced iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS units.

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Since the release of the iPhone 4S, artificially intelligent Siri has amazed, surprised, and in some cases, disappointed when it comes to just how intelligent it is. While it seems to handle singing duets pretty well, many have pointed to issues with thick accents, lack of Maps and local service support in UK, and its ability to dial emergency services. Most of the time Siri understands what you’re saying, but if it doesn’t, it most often provides a simple response letting you know. However, when the guys over at Electricpig asked Siri to perform some tasks they knew it couldn’t, they came up with some interesting results:

As you can see in the image above, after asking Siri to “Make a voice memo”, it responded:

“I haven’t yet learned to take dictation, James. You’ll have to use the Voice Memos app for that.”

Obviously “yet” is the key word here. Could this be a hint at Apple’s plans to bring new features to Siri in future updates? Possibly incrementally through the cloud rather than waiting for a major iOS update? The guys also asked Siri a number of other similar questions from “Update my Facebook status” to “Send a tweet” and “Open in iTunes”. When they asked it to “Download an app”, Siri responded:

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Live from Apple Q4 2011 earnings call, Tim Cook is answering questions from the press and just discussed, among other things, his thoughts on Siri, patents disputes, and the disaster in Thailand.

Of course Cook was asked to comment about Siri and did so using the words “amazing” and “incredible” calling it a “profound innovation” and saying, “over time…many, many people will use it in a substantial way”.

Talking on patent disputes, Cook of course wouldn’t discuss specific cases but did note:

“We spend a lot of time and money and resource on coming up with incredible innovation…we dont like it when someone else takes those”, he continued, “unfortunately we’ve been pushed into the court system as a remedy.”

When asked to talk about the potential unibody enclosure shortage we reported yesterday, he mentioned it’s being treated as a concern and that Apple is “currently investigating”. He also talked about the recent disaster in Thailand and its potential impact (quote via This is my next):

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We were all ready to start making fun of these guys for being wacko gun nuts and wasting a perfectly good $650 iPhone until the slo-mos came in about halfway through the video. OK, that was cool.  Where’s the Android version?  Via Giz (of course)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=B489u_1ZBIA#!]

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ZDNet just published a story claiming Apple’s percentage of revenue has “been on the decline for years”. The story claims that percentage is currently 2.2 percent of sales which seems pretty low compared to other technology players (especially when Apple is so innovative).

But this isn’t factoring in how items such as a reported $200 million investment in Siri technology, a new CEO, and investments in the company’s 175-acre Spaceship campus contribute to overall growth…

Thanks to commenter Glenn who points out this perfect quote from Steve Jobs:

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” — Steve Jobs, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998

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Since CNET posted the iPhone 5 story this weekend…

…the iPhone 5 is a “complete redesign. This is a very large project that Steve dedicated all of his time to. He was not that involved in the 4S because his time was limited.”

…we thought it would be a good time to tell you what our sources think happened to the iPhone 5 that some were expecting. We’ve heard from Foxconn managers as well as Apple employees and carrier partners on this and have tried to piece together the full story.

The iPhone 4S as you see it was originally planned to be released at WWDC with iOS 5, like every iPhone before it.

But something happened around February of this year that threw everything off. Apple was still integrating the Siri team and code into iOS and it was going much slower than planned. In February, Apple knew they weren’t going to be able to get an iOS 5 Beta to developers in April and they sure weren’t going to have a stable version by WWDC. They would be lucky to get a final version of Siri into customers’ hands by the holiday shopping season (Siri is currently in Beta in three languages).

At the same time, Apple’s iPhone 5 (teardrop) plans were moving along on or ahead of schedule and the first prototypes were testing well. CNET says that Steve Jobs was overseeing this project which sounds about right.

With mid-October being the earliest possible date of a Siri-fied iOS being ready – with “Apple-levels” of polish –Apple had to look at its options. Would they release the iPhone 4S at WWDC with a modified version of iOS 4? Without Siri and the other iOS 5 improvements, the update might have seemed a little bland to the average customer.

Instead Apple chose a different route.

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He didn’t call it a world-changing event, like Siri’s co-founder did in the days leading up to the iPhone 4S announcement. But it is pretty clear that he knows how profound Siri will be to smartphone users.

Woz on his last call with Jobs, the future of Apple and other big stuff below:

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LM7edH6ZpE]

We stumbled across this video on YouTube… and Siri clearly should not yet be used by non-native speakers of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, or Germany. As you can see in the video, the speaker is talking in English but with a foreign accent, and Siri does not understand one command. “Read dick”.

Update: Australian accent tested by Gizmodo AU below:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNsrl86inpo

When we interviewed Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky in the week before the Siri announcement, he said that Apple’s foray into ‘mainstreaming the Virtual Personal Assistant’ would be the next step in human interfaces. Keyboard, Mouse, Touch Screen, and now Voice. A World-Changing event.

Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.

With some customers getting their hands on their iPhone 4S early, there are some early Siri walkthroughs hitting the net, below:

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The BBC has just posted their hands-on with Apple’s new iPhone 4S. While there isn’t much to show asthetically, BBC demos Apple’s new camera application and the hit of the show, the Siri personal assistant. You’ll notice how Siri actually repeats back to you what you say, and it works pretty seamless, even with a British accent.

Check out Apple’s Siri demo below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4D4kRbEdJw]
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On Tuesday, Apple will change the way humans interact with electronic devices. All over again.

Perhaps the biggest announcement at Apple’s iPhone event on Tuesday will be Assistant, Apple’s evolution of the Siri Personal Assistant Software. Siri, you’ll remember, is the company Apple picked up for a rumored $200 million in April of last year for, in Steve Jobs’ words, its “Artificial Intelligence”, not search or speech recognition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpjpVAB06O4]

During Siri’s brief two months on its own, it described itself as a ‘VPA’:

Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) represent the next generation interaction paradigm for the Internet. In today’s paradigm, we follow links on search results. With a VPA, we interact by having a conversation. We tell the assistant what we want to do, and it applies multiple services and information sources to help accomplish our task. Like a real assistant, a VPA is personal; it uses information about an individual’s preferences and interaction history to help solve specific tasks, and it gets better with experience.

Apple has long wanted to bring an Artificial Intelligence-based Personal Assistant to the masses. In the late 80’s, Apple made the Knowledge Navigator series of videos (example below) to showcase this ambition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8&start=30]

In the video, the professor mentions that someone wrote an article 5 years ago trashing Jill’s research (watch from 1:25 min onwards, at 1:50 min he mentions more details) – The computer says the doctor’s name and says his article in 2006 – which means the professor is in 2011. Ha! Thanks PBHK!

The world has come a long way since then, but as you’ll see on Tuesday, Apple had remarkable foresight way back in 1987.

We had the chance to speak to Siri’s co-founder and board member, Norman Winarsky…

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While we have independently been expecting the new iPhone to feature little exterior differences from the iPhone 4, there still has been some debate over the new iPhone’s design. Today, rumors of a re-design can essentially be put to rest. Inside the latest iTunes beta is a specific mention of the “iPhone 4S.” Along with the new iPhone name of “iPhone 4S” comes an image, and it is of a CDMA iPhone 4.

Unless Apple still has the CDMA iPhone 4 as a placeholder image until the new iPhone is announced, we’re fairly confident that the iPhone 4S will pack the CDMA iPhone design. iTunes only holds two iPhone 4S references: black and white versus the four iPhone 4 references of black/GSM, black/CDMA, white/GSM, and white/CDMA. This may also confirm the rumors of the new iPhone being a dual-mode/CDMA + GSM handset.

iPhone 4S confirmed as N94 (iPhone 4,1) that showed up in Apple’s inventory system:

The new iPhone will likely feature the dual-core A5 processor from the iPad 2, and eight megapixel camera, 1GB of RAM, Nuance-based speech-to-text Dictation, and the breakthrough Assistant feature based on Apple’s purchase of Siri. Everything you need to know can be read here.

Thanks, Ron!

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Update Sep 27 – Apple has sent “Let’s Talk, iPhone” ;) invites to the event.

It’s time to show our cards.

If you crack open the casing of the new iPhone, you will find significant upgrades from the iPhone 4. The new iPhone features Apple’s dual-core A5 processor like the iPad 2 for even faster performance, better gaming, and drastically improved graphics. Apple didn’t stop there though. Unlike the iPad 2, the new iPhone packs 1GB of RAM, according to a source familiar with the SOC’s manufacturing. That not only means better web browsing, but more importantly, new background tasks that Apple will introduce in the new iPhone’s software will perform much better.

The new iPhone will also feature an upgraded camera system. In terms of hardware, the new camera is an 8 megapixel sensor that takes incredibly high-resolution and clear shots, even in low light conditions because it has a backlit sensor. Also, panorama photography references have been found in the iOS SDK on multiple occasions which means we’ll likely see that feature. Other than that, the camera front-end system is reportedly mostly the same.

The new iPhone also contains Qualcomm Gobi Baseband chips that allow it to operate on both GSM and CDMA networks. We can’t yet confirm or deny the rumors that Apple was building a virtual SIM card system or if it has an NFC chip yet, however.

Although some may be happy with the new iPhone’s substantial internal hardware boosts, the new device’s biggest selling point is actually a software feature called Assistant. As we first revealed, Assistant is Apple’s Siri-inspired, system-wide voice navigation system. It so far appears that iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users will be left out in the fun, unfortunately, because the feature requires the A5 CPU and additional RAM.

Everything you could possibly want to know about Assistant is after the break…

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpjpVAB06O4]

Apple’s purchase of Siri in early 2010 and their partnership with Nuance in 2011 has many hoping that Apple has something like speech-to-text or voice-navigation up its sleeve for iOS 5. One of the remaining advantages of Android over iOS is its system-wide Voice Actions technology.

Unfortunately, WWDC and the iOS 5 announcement came and went and nothing related to voice-navigation had been announced. Even so, the Apple-Nuance partnership has been confirmed by way of Nuance voices in Apple’s OS X Lion and Nuance speech-to-text functionality that is referenced in Apple’s internal settings modules.

But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t hard at work at this very moment trying to cram some native OS level voice recognition technology into iOS 5 before launch.

Coupled with Nuance speech-to-text, Apple appears to be planning to take the fruit of their Siri purchase and fully integrate it into this fall’s release of iOS 5. Because these new features have yet to appear in iOS 5 on the iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS, Apple might be saving these new features as an iPhone 5 exclusive. This would be akin to Apple’s decision to make Voice Control and video recording exclusive features to the iPhone 3GS, even though they could technically function on earlier models of the iPhone. As you can see in Siri’s promotional video above, the company advertises itself as “your virtual personal assistant.”

As you can see in the screenshot above from an Apple iPhone test unit, Apple is currently developing and testing a new iOS feature called “Assistant.” This screenshot, from a reliable source, is corroborated with our own SDK findings (below). The source did warn, though, that development is not yet completed – and just went into testing – and may not even be finished by the time the next iPhone ships.

More info after the break…

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