Apple rumoured to be unveiling its own smart home speaker at WWDC 2017

When it comes out, Essential Home will be the first smart speaker to come with Siri. Apple has to catch up now.

While Apple has the HomeKit platform, it doesn’t have its own smart home speaker like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and soon-to-arrive Essential Home. But that might change and it’s going to happen sooner than later. It’s being rumoured that Apple will be unveiling a Siri-powered speaker at its Worldwide Developers Conference next week. But you mustn’t expect it to be available immediately. It’s being pegged for a fall release.

Making its own smart home speaker will be advantageous for Apple in terms of getting users to stay exclusively with its products. It’ll serve as a hub for all the HomeKit accessories and will help in a way promote its other products. For example, it will use Apple Music in place of the other music streaming services when you ask it to play a song. The product is rumoured to be getting virtual surround sound technology and conflicting reports are out about whether it’ll have a screen or not. If there is any truth to the rumours, we’re about to hear about it pretty soon.

Source: Mashable

Siri updated with 'Lego Batman' tie-in phrases

If you've watched the hilarious and entertaining Lego Batman movie you know that Siri is the voice of the Bat computer as well as a source of comedy in the movie. Apple has apparently partnered with movie studio to enable some movie-specific responses on iOS devices. Simply refer to Siri as 'Hey Computer," and the voice assistant will speak like she does in the movie and refer to you, the user as Lego Batman. If you haven't watched the movie yet, some of the jokes may not make much sense as they're referring to specific scenes.

While not the monumental update we've expected from Siri, this is a fun add-on for fans of the movie and possible a new cross-promotional tool for Apple's voice assistant.

Source: AppleInsider

Apple’s newest hire looks to address Siri’s shortcomings

Looks like Apple want to make sure Siri keeps up with its competition. The tech company has hired Carnegie Mellon University Professor Russ Salakhutdinov to head its team working on artificial intelligence, which is considered a big part of the industry’s future. And if this is your line of work, Salakhutdinov is even hiring people for his team. He’ll also remain as a professor at Carnegie Mellon. One of latest researches involve work on how to better derive context behind the questions people pose. If applied to Apple’s tech, that can come quite handy and perhaps put them back in the running in the virtual assistant space.

Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my teamhttps://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA

— Russ Salakhutdinov (@rsalakhu) October 17, 2016

 

Source: Recode

Barbra Streisand gets Siri to correctly pronounce her name, hints at possible release of new iOS update

It pays to be a superstar with friends in really high places. Barbra Streisand has had her name mispronounced by Apple’s virtual assistant Siri all this time. Siri has been pronouncing her name as “Strei-zand” instead of “Strei-sand.” So, what is Barbra Streisand to do? She calls Apple CEO Tim Cook to see if he can fix this, and, of course, he does.  As she narrates this experience in an interview with NPR, Streisand seems to have released an important update when it comes to iOS 10, which might be heading our way on September 30^th.

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