Siri

Apple has added its digital assistant, Siri, to the iPod Touch, the company announced at its event in San Francisco today.

The change was included with upgrades that are also included on Apple's new iPhone 5. As CNET reporters at the event and on CNET's live blog noted, Apple has made a Touch that emulates the functions of an iPhone, without the phone service.

The device is also available in a myriad of bright colors and with a wrist strap, which may indicate that Apple is shooting for a younger crowd for the device.

CNET's reviews of … Read more

One of Siri's founding members from long before it was acquired by Apple and turned into the feature found in the iPhone 4S, has left the company.

Adam Cheyer, who co-founded Siri, Inc. in March 2008, has left his job at Apple, Bloomberg reports. CNET has learned that his departure took place months ago, and that the decision was fueled by a desire to spend more time with his family and eventually work on other projects.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple purchased Siri in early 2010. At the time, the company had a … Read more

I've owned an iPhone every year since its 2007 debut. Every one. The reward for such reckless upgrading has been a sense of the iPhone's evolution over those years. What started as a device that had not many apps to speak of, but dripped futurism, has become an always-on, location-aware, frighteningly integral part of my nervous system.

While I've listed what we expect out of the next iPhone, I haven't told you what I want. So, here's my own personal list of what matters most...to me.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Nokia again faces make-or-break point with new Lumia phones.

- CNET First Take: Nokia Lumia 820.

- CNET First Take: Nokia Lumia 920.

- Why Nokia nixed an SD card slot for the Lumia 920.

- The secret behind Nokia's 41-megapixel camera phone.

- Nokia's new PureView image stabilizer is amazingly faked in this promo video.

- 4Chan goes public with its API, boasting 22 million unique monthly visitors.

- Spike Jonze's new film is about a man who falls in love with his phone.

- Kinsey Institute pulls app encouraging users to log sexy time.… Read more

Compared to Apple's Siri speech-activated personal assistant, IBM's Watson is a genius.

Zooey Deschanel might ask Siri, "Is that rain?"

She might ask Watson, "Who's the author that wrote, 'It was a dark and stormy night'?"

(Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for the literary-minded among you.)

Until now, Watson's tech has been too big to cram into a mobile device. All those smarts takes a room full of servers, an incredible amount of calculations and a thick wire into the electrical mains.

That's about to change.

The power consumption behind Watson's performance is &… Read more

Nuance, a company that plays a part in some of the most well-known speech-recognition services on the market, has unveiled its own intra-app service, called Nina.

With Nina's help, iOS and Android developers can bring speech recognition, text-to-speech, and voice biometrics to their individual applications. Nina works much in the same way as Siri, allowing users to provide voice commands that the technology then follows. And with the open software development kit, Nuance says that it can be integrated quickly into existing apps.

Nuance has played an integral role in Siri's development. Nuance provided technology to Siri before … Read more

Apple's virtual personal assistant Siri has been smacked with yet another lawsuit.

This time around, Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University filed a lawsuit against Apple on Friday, charging the company with violating patents it holds related to voice-to-text technology. The university says that it acquired two patents in 2007 and 2010 in the U.S., and believes that Siri violates those.

Apple is certainly no stranger to Siri lawsuits. Over the last year, the company has been hit with everything from class-action suits complaining of the service's performance to infringement. Earlier this month, Shanghai-based voice application developer … Read more

Apple's Siri has been known to get some queries wrong. But it might have flubbed an advertising opportunity as well.

In a July issue of The Economist, Apple reportedly took out an ad for Siri. In it, users are shown a forest behind a hand holding the iPhone, and a question at the top, saying, "What does poison oak look like?" On the iPhone, Siri provides an answer, but appears to display poison ivy and not poison oak.

According to the Associated Press, which was first to report on the news, Lena Struwe, an associate professor of … Read more

Martin Scorsese has become the latest celebrity enlisted by Apple to talk up Siri in a TV commercial.

The commercial, which premiered today, shows the movie director posing rapid-fire questions at the iPhone 4S voice assistant in the back of a New York City taxi cab. Following in the footsteps of Samuel L. Jackson, Zooey Deschanel, and John Malkovich, Scorsese is shown using the feature to review his calendar, reschedule appointments, locate friends, and check local traffic.

The commercial concludes with Scorsese telling Siri how much he likes her and saying that "she's going places."

As happy … Read more