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by Michael Fisher | January 3, 2013 5:26 PMRead OnOn the last 2012 episode of the Pocketnow Weekly podcast, recorded immediately following the Christmas holiday, we spent a little time trading tales of gadgets wished-for and gadgets received from generous gift-givers. More importantly, we also swapped stories of an observational nature. The holidays are more than an opportunity to re-learn how to share a table with distant relatives; if you're lucky, they're also an occasion to observe how normal people interact with technology - often new technology. We talked about that more on today's episode of the Weekly -heavens, we do chat our ...
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by Michael Fisher | August 7, 2012 8:30 AMRead OnIt happened so long ago, the memories come to me in vague shadows. It was an unremarkable weeknight in 2002. I was watching TV in my college dorm room, probably waiting for the then-new Star Trek: Enterprise to return from a commercial break. A 30-second spot for Nokia flashed onto the screen, the last frame dwelling on the image of a mobile phone amid a field of futuristic blue plasma. The model number escapes me, as does the sub-brand, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that closing product image, which made the phone look, on my 13-inch CRT TV screen, like it had no buttons. As ...
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by Michael Fisher | July 4, 2012 3:55 PMRead OnLike it or not, voice control on mobile devices is back, and this time it may be here to stay. That's a more complex introduction than it seems. I want to dissect it a little, piece by piece, and I want to do it out of order, just to keep you on your toes. The first prerequisite we need to cover is that voice control on mobile devices came about in the first place: for something to be "back," it needs to have first existed. For decades, talking to a piece of technology that was intelligent enough to understand you was the stuff of science fiction. 2001: A Space Odyssey's ...
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by Jaime Rivera | July 1, 2012 9:29 PMRead OnThere's no denying that the definition of what a smartphone is has shifted quite a few times in less than a decade. At first it was a phone with PIM functionality, later a PDA that had phone functionality, later a phone that was smart enough to handle anything developers could throw at it, and as of a few months ago, it's all about a phone that talks to you. I know many of you started reading this thinking that Voice Control is the big thing now, but as we've been going through the different alternatives in the market lately, it's clear that the technology is not there yet. Our first ...
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by Jaime Rivera | June 27, 2012 8:00 AMRead OnThere's no debating that Apple didn't invent voice command or text-to-speech. As much as Siri is their new crown jewel, it didn’t even come from their labs. All Apple did was buy a great idea and improve it dramatically if compared to what Siri was originally. At times when competition between smartphone OEMs is fierce, it follows a trend we’ve seen for at least half a decade now, where manufacturers have already mastered the art of how phone calls should sound on what’s intended to act also as a phone, and the challenge now is, how else can it be set apart from competitors. Sadly, ...
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by Michael Fisher | June 15, 2012 6:52 PMRead OnI'm running the beta version of iOS 6 on my 2012-edition iPad here in the office, which counts support for Siri among its many improvements. Our own Jaime Rivera has already whipped up a full preview of iOS 6, but I thought I'd take a ground-level look at just one of its features- specifically, how Siri feels on a tablet. We’ll take her for a spin, and then we’re gonna do a little “talk-off” between Siri and S-Voice on the Galaxy S III. The reason for our re-tour of Apple's voice-control app? Well, it's clear that Cupertino considers Siri more than a hobby; you don't hire Samuel L. ...
Posts tagged with: Siri