voice

Ever made plans or laid out action steps in your head while on a business call, and later wished you had taken notes?

Maybe you were on your Bluetooth headset while driving, or you couldn't find a pen. Or maybe you just plain hate scrawling anything on paper at all.

Enter Tote Notes, a brilliantly conceived app that pops up after voice calls so you can dictate notes before you forget any important details.

Here's how it works. Whenever you get off a call, a Tote Notes dialog box pops up asking whether you want to record a … Read more

Ever made plans or laid out action steps while on a business call, and wish you had taken notes? Maybe you were on your Bluetooth headset while driving, or you couldn't find a pen. Or maybe you just plain hate scrawling anything on paper at all.

Enter Tote Notes, a brilliantly conceived app that pops up after voice calls so you can dictate notes before you forget any important details. It not only records voice notes, it e-mails them to you, and even transcribes them to text so you can easily search for them later.

Here's how it … Read more

The prospect of asking Apple's Siri to control items besides your iPhone is starting to look a whole lot more real.

A developer known only as Pete, or @plamoni on Twitter, has created a special proxy server through which he can issue voice commands to the iPhone 4S voice assistant, who can then perform tasks outside of the iPhone. The first target: his thermostat.

Tapping into a hack set up last week by developer Applidium that lets people add more functionality to Siri, Pete managed to create a plugin to control a Wi-Fi thermostat by voice. In the video … Read more

Donald Bell joins us on the show today to discuss The Google Music Service, a Nexus launch date, and the biggest tablet you've ever seen! All of that and more on this week's episode of Android Atlas Weekly for November 16nd 2011.

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NEWS

-Google releases source code for Ice Cream Sandwich

-Google Music Event

-Canada's big three lay out launch plans for the Galaxy Nexus; US users jealous, eh?

-Google Nexus FCC

-First Sale of Nexus & Breakfast!… Read more

Look out Siri, there's a new virtual assistant in town--and you definitely don't want to get on his bad side.

YouTube user programmer4fun has created his own virtual personal assistant using a 3D model of the Terminator T-800 cyborg and his Microsoft Kinect.

In his video description, programmer4fun explains that he used the Kinect SDK to make use of the head tracking and speech recognition software. The Kinect sits behind him, though he notes it can be anywhere, while a small LED projector beams the Terminator's head onto the wall. He's even built in code to support anaglyph 3D if you really want to get up close and personal with the Terminator. … Read more

Former technology journalist Jon Briggs has revealed himself as the voice of Siri in the United Kingdom, despite a warning from Apple to keep silent.

In an interview with the U.K.'s Telegraph, Briggs outed himself as the voice behind Daniel, the name given to the U.K.'s version of Siri. iPhone 4S users who change Siri's language in iOS 5 to English (United Kingdom) can hear the actual voice, which naturally carries with it a slight British accent.

Briggs spilled the beans even after a call from an Apple PR rep who told him not to speak publicly about Siri, … Read more

Amazon snapped up the voice startup Yap two months ago, a new filing revealed.

The Atlantic today reported the purchase, which took place in September but wasn't formally announced at the time, from a filing with the SEC (PDF).

Amazon is not named in the document, but the Atlantic tracked the address of the "surviving company" back to a building in Seattle that's owned by Amazon.

Yap came onto the scene in 2007 with technology that could transcribe voice commands into text. The service was originally aimed at teens who did a lot of texting, and … Read more

When the iPhone originally launched, it brought with it a new way of doing voice mail.

No longer did users have to dial a random number to listen to each voice mail played back, all the while interacting with a computer voice. Visual voice mail allows you to skip the voice mails you don't want to listen to, and get to the messages that are truly important. One small feature of visual voice mail is the ability to restore deleted voice mails. … Read more

Google Voice has been the in-crowd's way to make and receive calls for a while now, but for the past few weeks I've been doing something with even more hipster cred.

I've hooked my Google Voice account up to an old-school landline handset that even my grandmother couldn't tell apart from Ma Bell, and I did away with the need to involve a PC or pesky things like phone bills in the whole process. Smells like freedom to me.

If you detect another VoIP product afoot here, you're right on the money. I've been testing the OBi100 and OBi110 for quite a while now.

The idea is actually pretty simple and will be familiar to many Skype or Vonage fans who use similar products. Basically, OBi makes small converter boxes that plug directly into your broadband router on one end, and a traditional landline phone on the other. OBi has its own voice over Internet Protocol service, OBiTalk, to connect to other OBi users for free, but the real selling point is using the box as a bridge to Google Voice and a handful of other services.… Read more