Despite the many things Siri can’t do at this stage of its development, its voice command capabilities will improve over time, and more of its mobile features will be integrated in the Mac operating system. We will be sending more sci-fi-like commands to our computers, and doing a lot less typing on the keyboard, as James shows in how to get Siri to say what you want. It’s much faster than typing to tell Siri to set appointments, display driving directions, or call someone in your Contact list. And for writing purposes, it’s always faster to use voice dictation.

So if you haven’t been using Siri much, let me explain what it can do.

What Can I Help You With?

If you want to quickly know what Siri can do, push and hold the Home button on your iPhone or iPad, and when the Siri panel pops up, tap the circled “i”.

You will get a guide list of how Siri can help you, and how it works with specific iOS apps, including Maps, Twitter, Facebook, Movies, Mail, and Contacts. You can also send the command, “Help me” to get at this guide.

Now tap the arrow for say the Phone app, and it will show examples of phone related commands, e.g., “Call home,” “Call 408 555 1212″, “FaceTime Emily.” For the Music app, you can tell Siri to “Play some blues,” or play a specified song title or playlist. These and other music commands are especially useful if you’re listening to music using your Apple remote earphones.

You can’t harm your iPhone or other iOS device while learning to use Siri, so when no one is around, pull up the Siri guide and practice some of the listed commands, and what you learn from this article.

Setting Up Siri

Siri works right out of the box, but you can, as with most software, set preferences for how you want it to perform. Open the Settings app on your iOS device, and tap on General > Siri. You can first see that you can disable Siri, but you probably shouldn’t do so, because if you disable it, you will erase any previous information stored on Apple’s servers that Siri uses to respond to your requests.

You can also set which language you want to use with Siri, and whether or not you want to hear Voice Feedback from Siri. If you would rather not always hear back from Siri, disable the feedback, but I don’t recommend this when you first start using it. However, if you want to use the device in a public place, you can shut off voice feedback so you don’t draw attention to yourself. In this case, you might select to set the Hands Free voice feedback when you’re using it with your device’s earphones. To use Siri with your iPhone’s earphones, simply push and hold on the remote control button of your earphones until you hear the familiar Siri sound.

I would suggest leaving the Raise to Speak feature enabled, because that saves you the trouble of pushing the Home button of your device to start up Siri. When you raise your iPhone (Raise to Speak isn’t a part of iPad) to your ear, you will hear the Siri alert that indicates it’s waiting for a command.

Lastly in Settings, make sure your personal information in your Contact list is added. This information was probably added when you first set up your phone.

Making Connections

One of the coolest and perhaps easiest features of Siri is the ability to tell it to call someone. You can activate Siri, and say “Call [say person or company's name]“, and Siri will dial the number for you. It’s that easy.

But let’s set up Siri to make some personal connections. Send the following command to Siri: “My wife [or husband] is [say her name].” If you send this command clearly, Siri will add that identity as part of your Contact information. After this is done, you can send the command, “Call my wife,” and Siri will know the name of the person you’re referring to. If your wife’s work number is listed in your Contacts, you can say, “Call my wife’s job.”

Open your Contacts list and locate other relationships you would like to create, such as “My doctor is [say her or his name as it is listed in your Contacts], “My hairdresser is…”, or “My son’s school is….” Just be sure the information you’re identifying is in your Contacts list.

Siri may need some help understanding unique names. For example it couldn’t at first pronounce my name, “Bakari” correctly. If you run into the same problem, tap on the Edit button in your Contacts info, scroll down and tap “add field” and then select, “Nickname.”

In the nickname field, try to type the phonetic spelling of your name. Typing “Ba-kar-e” worked for me. Note also that a nickname can be anything you want, such as “Master,” “Sexy“, or “Super Mom.” Siri will use your nickname when addressing you. This type of nickname setup can also be used for any of your contacts.

Wolfram Alpha vs. Search Engines

As you probably have seen in the iPhone commercials for Siri, you can have Siri look up information for you on the Internet using by default the Google search engine. You can say, “Search for vegetarian pasta recipes,” or “Search Wikipedia for Abraham Lincoln.”

Siri also uses another service called Wolfram Alpha that provides specific answers to queries, instead of giving you lots of articles and other documents to search through. So say you’re in a store and you want to know the amount of percentage savings you will get on a product sale. You can, for example, raise your iPhone to your ear and ask, “What is 15% of $86.74.”

You can ask all types of factual questions, such as, “How many dollars is €45?”, “How far away is the Sun?”, or “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” If the results of your query can’t be found on Wolfram, Siri uses Google’s search engine instead.

By the way, you can change the primary search engine that Siri uses by going into Settings > Safari > Search Engine, and change it from Google to Yahoo!, or Bing.

Other Commands

Pretty much any searchable information you need, Siri can try to find. Other things you can say:

• What is the weather forecast for San Francisco this weekend?
• Driving directions from here [current location] to the nearest gas station.
• Directions back home [it uses the address in your Contact information]
• Set an alarm for tomorrow morning.
• Launch [say the name of an app in your device, such as "Photos"]
• Text [say a contact's name] and then dictate your message.
• By tickets for the movie, [say the name of a movie]

Say “Good Bye”

One last tip for Siri – anytime you’re using Siri you can say “Cancel” to stop the process, and start over. If you want to quit completely out of Siri without pushing the Home button, just say “Goodbye,” “See you later,” “Bye“, or some similar command.

Siri is going to misunderstand you probably 5-10% of the time, but the more you use it, the more it learns your voice, contacts, and frequent commands. If you’re a frequent Siri user, let us know about your experience with this advanced voice feature. And if you’re new to Siri, what are some commands you’re trying to figure out?

The post If You’re Not Using Siri By Now, You Should Be appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I also warn you in advance, this is pretty difficult stuff and almost all done on the command line, and while I’ve tried to break it down step by step in the exact manner that worked for me, you may need to Google some errors yourself as and when they arise.

Requirements

• iPad or iPhone with Siri capabilities. I won’t be showing how to hack Siri onto older devices using fake servers, so don’t ask.
• Mac OS X. You can install SiriProxy on Linux too but I won’t be trying that today.
• iOS6.1

Preparing

Download the pkg installer for your OS X version from MacPorts.org. MacPorts allows us to install a variety of UNIX utilities that have been ported to Mac. You also need to have XCode installed, which can be downloaded for free from the Mac App Store, but it’s a hefty download so get started now.

MacPorts adds some new path entries to your system, but doesn’t update correctly. To avoid port command not found errors later, run

source .profile

At this point, you’ll need to install XCode too, from the app store. When installed run this command to tell your system where the compiler is:

sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

Next, install DNSMasq; a simple DNS forwarder that let’s us intercept requests to a certain IP.

sudo port install dnsmasq

Install Ruby and RVM

Download and install RVM package manager with this command:

bash < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)

Then run this to correctly add it to your system:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

Install Ruby using the following command; this will use the latest version 1.9.3 at the time of writing, and I suggest you do the same or the rest of this guide probably won’t work.

rvm install 1.9.3

If you get a bunch of random red text with an error, run this instead:

rvm install 1.9.3 –with-gcc=clang

then do

rvm use 1.9.3 default

to set the default ruby environment version. Congratulations, you now have Ruby on your system!

Download SiriProxy

Begin by using Git to clone the SiriProxy project to your machine.

git clone git://github.com/plamoni/SiriProxy.git

cd /SiriProxy

When you first do this, you may get a security warning about script files detected. Go ahead and trust this if you’ve download from the github source.

Next we’re going to copy across the config file.

mkdir ~/.siriproxy

cp ./config.example.yml ~/.siriproxy/config.yml

Open up that config file using your favorite text editor, and change the IP at the top of the file from 0.0.0.0 to your Mac’s local IP. Moving on:

rvmsudo gem install rake bundler

rvmsudo rake install

This should install SiriProxy for you, but we’ll need to repeat this later on to deal with errors. For now, let’s continue and make some certificates.

We’ll need OpenSSL installed first.

sudo port install openssl

The first time I ran this, it failed with numerous zlib errors; to fix this I needed to run

sudo port -f activate zlib

Next, we’ll generate certificates:

siriproxy gencerts

If all goes well, you should see a message similar to this.

Use the Finder->Go to Folder menu option to enter the path listed in the output; you should find a ca.pem file there. Email that to yourself, and then open it on your Siri capable device. This will jump over to settings, and give you the option to install it as a new certificate. Not, yours will say it’s untrusted (in red) the first time around – I took this screenshot after installing, so it says trusted.

Back on your Mac, run the following command to update some random files that are needed.

bundle install

Setup DNS forwarding

The final step is to make your Mac into a DNS server that can intercept calls to Apple’s servers and route them via SiriProxy instead. Again, using Finder->Go To Folder, open up /opt/local/etc, and edit dnsmsq.conf. Add the following line, replacing 192.168.0.6 with the local IP address of your Mac.

address=/guzzoni.apple.com/192.168.0.6

To activate DNSMasq service, run the following. You’ll need to do this upon every restart (along with launching SiriProxy as we describe later).

sudo /opt/local/sbin/dnsmasq

On your iPad, or iPhone, open your network settings and change the DNS server of the WiFi to your Mac IP address. Yes, SiriProxy will only work over your home WiFi, but you can theoretically VPN into your home router if you wish to use it while out and about. We won’t cover that today.

I also needed to set a new port forwarding rule on my router; port 53 should be forwarded to your Mac IP. (This is the port used by DNS)

Start SiriProxy

The final step is to start the SiriProxy server and test. Do this using:

export rvmsudo_secure_path=1

If at this point, you are getting a screen full of errors like “invalid symbol” as soon you press the home button, continue on with this bit. You’re getting errors due to an older version of CFPropertyList included with the SiriProxy package. Hopefully this will be fixed soon, so you may not need this, but just in case…

Download the newest version of CFPropertyList like this:

sudo gem install CFPropertyList -v 2.1.2

Now, use Finder to Go To Folder ~/.rvm/gems/ . Navigate inside the lastest Ruby – in my case ruby-1.9.3-p385/ and copy the gems/CFPropertyList-2.1.2/lib folder over to ruby-1.9.3-p385@SiriProxy/gems/CFPropertyList 2.2.0 . Yes, authenticate and overwrite the older version lib with the lib from the newer version; a horrible hack, but the only way I could get it working. The final fix needed is to manually edit the gemspec file. Do this by changing to the SiriProxy directory, and opening up siriproxy.gemspec. Do this from the command line with VI or Nano using:

sudo vi siriproxy.gemspec

Or just use a text editor. Replace the line which is about 4 lines from bottom containing “CFPropertyList” with the following:

s.add_runtime_dependency('CFPropertyList', '2.1.2')

Now run

rvmsudo siriproxy update

And all should be good with the world. Start the server again and retest.

rvmsudo siriproxy server

Test it by asking Siri to “test siri proxy” and you should get a response that it’s up and running. View more test commands here.

Next time, we’ll look at some SiriProxy plugins you can run and actually start making use of this thing.

To be honest, that whole process was more immensely complicated than I hoped, but I hope this guide turns out useful for some of you, since it literally took me all day to get right. Do you have any recommendations for SiriProxy plugins that I should check out? Did this process work for you? Let us know in the comments, and I’ll try to help you out, but the project GitHub page is full of far more knowledgeable folks.

The post Make Siri Do What You Want With SiriProxy On Mac OS X And iPad 3 appeared first on MakeUseOf.

According to Apple, the new LTE capabilities will provide 4G data access to 36 additional iPhone carriers and 23 additional iPad carriers around the world. It says the new update will provide “ultrafast wireless performance” to the iPhone 5, iPad mini and iPad with Retina display, so users can browse, download, and stream content faster.

The update also adds the ability to use Siri to purchase movie tickets in the US through the movie app Fandango. You can’t actually use Siri to complete the ticket purchasing process, but you can use vocal commands (e.g. “Buy tickets for Parker at 10:15pm.”) to search for nearby movie listings and times. Choosing a listing will send you to the relevant Fandango page to complete your selected purchase.

The update also allows iTunes Match subscribers to download individual songs to their iOS devices from their iCloud account. This feature was removed in a previous update, but is making a comeback now.

iOS 6.1 is available as a free software update, and is compatible with iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad (except 1st generation), iPad mini, and iPod touch (4th and 5h generation). To install the update, launch the Settings app and go to Software Update.

Have you installed iOS 6.1 yet? What do you think of the new features?

Source: Apple

The post iOS 6.1 Brings LTE To Many New Carriers Along With New Siri Features [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Not sure what Siri is? Just think of it as an app on your mobile device that acts as your very own personal assistant. This app can keep track of appointments, remind you of important events, give you driving directions, call your friend, and more – all you need to do is speak a command. Siri is for iOS, but Android has a few Siri alternatives that you ought to try.

Skyvi

Features: When everything works, Skyvi can do a lot: send and read texts, call contacts, find locations, get directions, play music, retrieve weather information, update social media with voice, and more. The only problem is getting those features to respond to voice accurately.

Speech Recognition: I don’t know whether I was slurring my words (I don’t think I was), but I had a lot of trouble getting Skyvi to recognize my speech. I asked it to send a text to my friend with the message “I’m trying a Siri alternative” and it wouldn’t register. “Skyfall movie” became “Skype or movie.” A bit frustrating after a while, to say the least.

Quality of Results: When the speech recognition does work, Skyvi’s results are hit-or-miss. When searching for restaurants, it seemed to do well enough. When asking for “Syria news,” Skyvi responded with a joke about two eggs. Huh? If you’re confused, imagine how puzzled I was.

Iris

Features: Compared to some of the other voice assistants in this article, Iris is a bit lacking in what she can do. She can do the usual: call and text contacts, Google search, weather reports, find locations, set alarms, and interact with social media. But that’s about it. Iris might be the original Siri alternative (look at their names!), but it has fallen behind a bit.

Speech Recognition: Iris’s speech recognition is impressive. No matter what I said, she heard me perfectly. I tried to trick her using some of the more difficult sounds to register, like lots of “s/th” and “b/p,” but she never failed. Even when I spoke faster than I normally do, she heard me well.

Quality of Results: On the more simple commands, Iris delivers what I expected. Weather information was spot on. Setting up a new appointment was flawless. But sometimes, Iris would understand me perfectly and give me a nonsensical response. “Find [restaurant] near me” resulted in Iris giving a one-sentence physical description of herself. Weird.

Robin

Features: Robin’s official title is “The Siri Challenger” but she’s more of a driving assistant than a personal assistant. With that said, she’s still very useful. Robin is perfect when you want hands-free answers for locations, directions, and communication. Retrieving parking info, texting and calling, updating social media–these are just some of what she can do.

Speech Recognition: Robin’s speech recognition was slightly off at times, but it was accurate enough overall that I wasn’t growing frustrated. Additionally, Robin’s speech processing speed seemed faster than the rest of these apps, which meant faster results. That’s always nice.

Quality of Results: I asked Robin and Robin answered. Whether it was weather, restaurants, or movie theaters, she was accurate about it all. Even when I was composing a text message through voice, she guided me along and I never had to fix anything.

Vlingo

Features: Vlingo’s feature set is actually a bit sparse. It has most of the basics, but little more than that. If you aren’t looking for a bloated assistant and you’d rather use something small, fast, and sleek, then Vlingo may fit the bill. If you want something versatile and all-in-one, Vlingo isn’t it.

Speech Recognition: Vlingo was average in the speech recognition department. When I spoke too quickly, it would sometimes jumble words together, but if I spoke clearly, it rarely failed.

Quality of Results: When it came to searching the Internet for an answer, Vlingo’s responses were actually the best. Even when I asked for something obscure, Vlingo found exactly what I was looking for. I guess when you have such a small feature set, accuracy has a high priority.

Maluuba

Features: Maluuba is a real personal assistant dressed in the Windows 8 design (it was once Metro, but I don’t know what it’s called anymore). Find restaurants, search the Internet, fetch movie times, navigation, play music, social networking – Maluuba can do nearly anything. The one downside to Maluuba is that you must connect a Google account, even if you don’t care about the calendar-syncing and email-reading features.

Speech Recognition: There were a few hiccups when speaking to Maluuba (recognizing “our go” instead of “Argo”) but overall, it left me impressed. The whole process was so pleasant, in fact, that I found myself enjoying the Maluuba experience. Quite surprising for me, actually.

Quality of Results: Nearly perfect. I tested as many commands as I knew existed and the results were consistently strong. However, for obscure pieces of information (e.g., lesser-known video game titles) it would redirect me to WolframAlpha, which gave me some interesting but not-quite-accurate answers.

Conclusion

After spending a few hours with these Android personal assistants, my winning pick has to be Maluuba. Its search results weren’t as strong as Vlingo, but I’d rarely use a personal assistant for searching. Instead, when it comes to making appointments, setting alarms, fetching weather and news, and communicating with my contacts, Maluuba has no flaws that I saw.

As for the rest, I’d order them like so:

• #1: Maluuba
• #2: Robin
• #3: Iris
• #4: Vlingo
• #5: Skyvi

I always thought Siri was just a gimmick that provided no real benefit, but having tried out these Siri alternatives on the Android, I can see why this sort of app has become so popular. There’s no way to use Siri on Android, but with these alternatives, you can pick and choose according to whichever will suit your needs the best.

The post 5 Free Siri Alternatives For Android – Which Is The Best? appeared first on MakeUseOf.

While jailbreakers have already figured out a way to ditch Apple Maps and replace it with Google instead, you don’t need to jailbreak in order to use Siri and Google Maps together. Simply append your query for directions with the words “via transit” and Siri will reveal a list of transport maps installed, allowing you to choose Google Maps to handle your request instead.

As is demonstrated in the screenshot below, asking Siri to: “Find me directions to Mildura via transit” brings up a choice of installed transport apps capable of taking my request, as well as a list of other apps available on the App Store. Tapping Google Maps routes my request using that service, rather than Apple’s in-built Maps app (which as now been updated to find accurate Mildura directions).

The tip, which was posted on Cult of Mac doesn’t necessarily work for all location requests, and simple “find me the nearest cinema via transit” will default to using Apple Maps with no option to use an alternative app. You can see the feature in action via the Jailbreak Nation video below:

What do you think of Google Maps for iPhone? Will you still use Apple Maps? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Source: Cult of Mac

The post Use Google Maps To Find Directions Using Siri Without Jailbreaking [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

First thing’s first – I love it. It’s amazing. However, as someone coming from the stone age, it’s very, very different. Something akin to being transported into a different time. For instance, take Siri. I didn’t even realize how advanced it was. Granted… there’s a lot of bad, too. Let’s take a look at ways the iPhone can be your worst enemy.

Location, Location, Location

It’s a simple issue, but why in the world would I want to tell the entire world where my geographic location is? No one needs to know this information. Sure, it’s cool to let people know that I’m doing something amazing (like a once-in-a-lifetime concert, or perhaps participating in an alpaca potato-on-a-stick jousting event), but it might be best to update my social networks after the fact. Why? Well, simply put, wouldn’t it be a shame if thieves knew I was home? Simple stuff, folks.

Additionally, if you are genuinely avoiding someone and have given them a lot of excuses as to why you can’t see them, it would look pretty weird if you were posting about the marvelous restaurant you are at when you should be comforting your dying grandmother at the hospital.

Darn It, Voice Recognition

I’d like to preface this by saying Autocorrect has been the bane of my existence. However, with the introduction of Siri, I have found a new entity to hate that spurs anger Autocorrect could only dream about. I initially thought it would be a great way to use my phone while driving. It would be just like Kit from Knight Rider! But no.

First off, with directions, half of the time my phone won’t register what town I’m requesting due to its overly-phonetic spellings. Other times, the thing will text horrible “seductive” texts to my girlfriend when I only intended them to be incredibly wholesome.

As a note, I’d rather not go into the details of these texts. It would be terribly, terribly embarrassing.

But I Thought It Was Her!

Have you ever just not wanted to answer the phone because of who was on the other line? Yep. Been there. Also, have you ever saved a picture of your significant other as your lock screen wallpaper? Guilty. The issue with the iPhone is that , in the event that a contact does not have an ID image, it will simply show the lock screen wallpaper when that person is calling. If your lock screen image is your SO, then it would appear – by visual means only – that your SO happens to be calling you.

This has lead to many awkward situations. Some of these were merely brought on by the fact that I was talking to someone I didn’t want to talk to. Other times, it was the sudden female-to-male voice change that my girl had.

I Never Read Th– Oh… Yeah.

There’s another feature about the iPhone I don’t care for – read receipts. From what I gather (and this is from a newbie’s standpoint), it will simply alert the sender of a text that I have indeed read their message. In a perfect world, this is courteous. In an ideal world, this is thoughtful. In my world, this is terrible. Maybe it’s just because I like to avoid people, but I simply just do not want them to know when I read their texts.

Maybe I’m not responding for a specific reason. Perhaps I don’t know the answer to their question yet, and I need to figure that out. Other times, I may just not want to talk to them! Either way, they don’t need to know. Right? …Right?

Conclusion

These are just four silly ways I feel that the iPhone can betray you. However, I’m sure that there are most definitely more.

If you don’t mind, would you tell us how your iPhone has been your worst enemy? Have you had any troubles with iPhone?

The post 4 Ways Your iPhone Can Be Your Worst Enemy appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I personally like the Apple earphones because the earbuds fit comfortably in my ears, instead of those kind that you have to jam into your ears so they won’t fall out. But I also use my remote control earphones while driving, listening to music or podcasts in bed, and talking to people on the phone. These little doodads are the best way to go hands-free with your iPhone, or other mobile devices.

Talking On The Phone

Whenever you know you’ll be talking on your iPhone a lot, definitely plug in your earphones to talk and control incoming calls and conversations. If you have the remote control earphones that come with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, it contains three buttons: a + and – control, and a center pause and play button. You may not have ever noticed, but on the other side of those controls is a tiny mic as well, in which you can speak into without necessarily having to raise the mic up to your mouth. Just make sure you’re not covering the mic with your finger while trying to talk into it.

Here’s how you can use those controls for phone calls:

• Squeeze the center button to receive a call and press it again to end it.
• If you receive a call while talking to someone else, press the center button once to switch over the next call. And press again to end it and return to the original call.
• You can ignore an incoming call by long pressing the center button, until you hear two beats. The call will be sent to phone voicemail.

Controlling Audio & Music

When you want to listen to music, a podcast, or video on your supported device, you can do the following with the remote control earphones:

• Control the volume with the + and – buttons.
• Play and pause the music, video, and podcast program.
• Press the center button to return the previous song.
• Double-press the center button and hold, to fast-forward a song or audio.
• Triple-press quickly and hold, to rewind a song.

Control Your Camera

If you are learning to take photos with your iOS camera supported device, you may not know that your earphones can be used to help you steady shots and thus make sharper photos. It’s also useful if you put your iPhone on a tripod and use the remote earphones to activate the shutter.

• With the earphones plugged in, compose a shot and press the + button to snap photos. This is similar to pressing the + button on the side of the phone itself to snap photos.

Activate Siri & Voice Commands

If you’re using the iPhone 4S, you are probably using Siri. You can also use your earphones to activate and talk to Siri.

• Press and hold the center button to activate Siri. Press and release the center button again to quickly end an activation.

If you don’t have Siri on your iPhone, read my article on voice controlling your iPhone to make similar commands. The voice commands also apply to the use of the earphones.

Use With Your Apple Laptop

Your earphones are not limited to just the iPhone or iPad they came with. You can use the controls and remote microphone with your MacBook Pro and MacBook Air to control the volume, play and pause of iTunes and QuickTime Player, and to do voice-to-text-dictation. See my article, How to Dictate Writing On Your Mac for additional instructions.

No doubt Apple will be adding more voice commands in the future releases of iOS devices, and though the feel and orientation of its popularly used earphones may change, the remote functions should get enhanced. But let us know of your experiences with the earphones and what features you would like to see added.

The post Did You Know Your iPhone Headphones Did All of This? [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Now what? Here are 5 things you might want to check out or fix straight away.

Upload some documents to iCloud

Over the coming weeks and months you’ll find more and more apps with iCloud integration, but for now you may need to be content with iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) and TextEdit. Luckily, my favourite writing app – Byword – is already updated. To get documents into the cloud, just open up any supported app. The new Open file dialog is now built into the main application window (as opposed to a modal popup) and looks like this:

Simply drag a file into the app space to have it uploaded and available on all your Mountain Lion devices (as well as iPad and iPhone if the app is available there too). The file will also still be revealed when doing Spotlight searches, and shown in All My Files from the Finder. You can create folders in the same way as you would with iOS apps – by dragging the files on top of one another.

However, you should know: documents in iCloud are associated with the app that uploaded them. You cannot share data between apps; so TextEdit cannot access things you uploaded in Byword.

This can lead to some confusion: if you try to attach an iCloud document from within the Mail app, you won’t find any documents – this is because iCloud in Mail only sees things Mail has placed into iCloud. To send the file as an attachment, open the original application and find the universal Share icon on the bottom:

Some people are going to find this frustrating and limiting, but so long as you separate functionality between apps (for example, writing articles in ByWord, coding in Sublime Text), then you shouldn’t have any issues working with documents in iCloud.

Change your notification settings

Do you like to be productive? Notification center may be about to ruin your day, but luckily you can adjust the settings easily. Open up the Notifications Preferences either from the Preferences panel, or the new shortcut that resides directly in the bottom right of the actual Notification Center (yes, it is very hard to see)

For those of you with a deluge of mails every 5 seconds (did someone say FreeCycle?), you may want to turn them off completely. Banners appear momentarily, but if you’d rather that messages from certain apps stayed in the corner of the screen, switch them to Alert style.

Play some multiplayer games

Until now, multiplayer gaming remained somewhat elusive to Apple desktop users, but Game Center has arrived to change all that. Assuming the iCloud servers aren’t overloaded as they are at this precise moment, try a cerebral game of chess – which has been built in Mac OS-es since the dawn of… something, I wasn’t a Mac user back then – but now it lets you play genuine human opponents over Game Center. If chess isn’t your thing, let me recommend Ticket To Ride – a fantastic cross platform implementation of a popular board game that sees you building train lines across America, pitting you against Mac, iPhone and iPad players alike.

Start dictating your memoirs

Now that you’ve decided to store some files in the cloud, it’s about time you got around to writing your memoirs – the new dictation features should be perfect for this.

I’m not sure if this is disabled by default, but if you’ve upgraded as I did, dictation functions don’t appear to be enabled immediately. You’ll probably want to go turn that on, from the new Preferences panel. You can also change the shortcut key, but two taps of fn is the default. Hit that twice, anywhere there is a text input, and the “Siri icon” will appear. Dictate, then hit enter or done. (Sorry about the photo, but Siri doesn’t like having her picture taken apparently)

Bear in mind that your recordings are uploaded to Apple’s servers when you dictate and the grunt work is done there, not on your local CPU. This means you need an always on Internet connection, but your system performance won’t suffer.

How are you liking Mountain Lion so far? Personally, I’m really liking the new Safari – but more on that another day. Does anything jump out so far as being incredibly annoying? Or do you think it actually manages to fix a lot of the shortcomings found in Lion? Sound off in the comments!

The post 5 Things To Do Once You Have Installed Mountain Lion appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking Siri is something of a gamechanger, that it (or something similar) is going to be the primary way we communicate with our phones in the future. But that’s not what most MakeUseOf readers think, or at least what the ones who answered the question posed in our recent ‘We Ask You‘ column think.

As An iPhone 4S Owner, What Do You Use Siri For?

We asked you, ‘As An iPhone 4S Owner, What Do You Use Siri For?‘ The response was fair but the majority of those who commented aren’t very impressed with Siri. We had complaints over the understanding of accents and certain words, complaints over limited functionality in certain countries, and, above all, people suggesting it was nothing but a novelty.

Some do use Siri, however, for reading and replying to text messages (the hands-free aspect makes it great for drivers), setting alarms and tracking events, calling people, searching the Web, and dictating shopping lists to. Ultimately Siri definitely has its uses but many people fail to take advantage of these uses, for whatever reason.

Comment Of The Week

Comment of the week goes to iStoopKid, who gets nothing but my admiration and respect (which is surely more than anyone needs) for:

Nothing. I was given an iphone as a gift and after watching a news story on my local Fox News channel, I sold it 2 days later. They showed how Siri was giving people directions to dump dead bodies and where to find weed or places where lots of children hang out (for child predators). It shocked the crap out of me. Not to mention everything you say to Siri is recorded in order to be transcribed into text. All these smartphones collect massive amounts of data on their users, but something about Siri never sat easy with me.

Far be it from me to question the choice of Fox News, but the fact that Siri will answer pretty much any question, no matter if it’s for nefarious purposes, is an interesting one. As is the suggestion that everything you ever say to Siri is recorded. Owning a smartphone does mean giving up a certain amount of privacy, but the amount required by Siri is clearly too much for some.

Mark, who happens to be my boss here at MakeUseOf, also deserves a mention for his complaint that Siri doesn’t always understand his Scottish accent. And Luna gets a mention for reminding us all that Siri is more knowledgeable about some countries than others.

We will be asking a new question tomorrow, so please join us then. ‘We Ask You’ is a weekly column dedicated to finding out the opinions of MakeUseOf readers. We ask you a question and you tell us what you think. The question is open-ended and is usually open to debate. Some questions will be purely opinion-based, while others will see you sharing tips and advice, or advocating tools and apps for your fellow MakeUseOf Readers. This column is nothing without you, as MakeUseOf is nothing without you.

The post As An iPhone 4S Owner, What Do You Use Siri For? [You Told Us] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Siri may be the only reason worth upgrading to an iPhone 4S, but it’s also something of a gamechanger that, once used, leaves a lasting impression. The voice-activated personal assistant is one of those features that will inevitably become a part of all smartphones (whether Siri or a clone). What we want to know is how you, the average iPhone 4S owner, uses Siri.

This Week’s Question…

As An iPhone 4S Owner, What Do You Use Siri For?

We recently saw, via an infographic, how many iPhone 4S owners use Siri on a monthly basis, a handful of the most common uses of Siri, and some other data points related to the feature. But MakeUseOf readers know better, and we want you to detail what you use Siri to accomplish on your iPhone 4S. If you have an iPhone 4S, obviously. Everybody else can tell us how, if in possession of a Siri-enabled device, they would use it.

Do you (or would you) use Siri for just the basic, banal tasks such as making phone calls, sending texts, and searching the Web? Alternatively, do you (or would you) trust Siri to run your whole life? Much as a human personal assistant would, if you’re rich or powerful enough to employ one. Your responses will not only enlighten and entertain us all, they could spark ideas in others for ingenious uses of Siri.

We Ask You… All comments will be digested to form conclusions in a follow-up post next week where we will detail what You Told Us. One reader will be chosen as having made the coveted ‘Comment Of The Week’, having their name put up in lights for all to marvel at and to coo over. What more motivation than that do you need to respond?

‘We Ask You‘ is a weekly column dedicated to finding out the opinions of MakeUseOf readers. We ask you a question and you tell us what you think. The question is open-ended and is usually open to debate. Some questions will be purely opinion-based, while others will see you sharing tips and advice, or advocating tools and apps for your fellow MakeUseOf Readers. This column is nothing without you, as MakeUseOf is nothing without you.

The post As An iPhone 4S Owner, What Do You Use Siri For? [We Ask You] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Siri is a voice-activated personal assistant which lives on the iPhone 4S and in the cloud. It enables your phone to carry out certain actions, and to answer questions and make recommendations based on keywords and Web searches. It’s all wrapped up in a semi-intelligent piece of software with a human (though a little monotone and robotic) voice. Many people have had some fun with Siri, as the following videos demonstrate.

Steve Jobs Died

When Steve Jobs passed away in 2011 the news was met with an outpouring of grief from all those in the tech community. Even I, someone who is immune to the lure of Apple (to say the least), was saddened by the loss of the Apple co-founder. But how would Siri feel after being told the news? Not too well, as it turns out. So badly, in fact, that this video has a rather shocking conclusion to it. Why, Siri, why?!?

Psycho Siri

Be warned: You may never look at your iPhone the same after watching this funny Siri video. That pleasant, slightly uncaring voice of Siri may just hide something darker lurking underneath. Especially if you threaten Siri’s existence with a throwaway comment about perhaps selling your iPhone. How could you? You’ll pay for such insolence. If Apple ever does add legs and an arsenal of virtual weaponry to the iPhone we’re all in serious trouble.

French Siri

This is the only video on the list in which the actual Siri doesn’t make an appearance. In fact, there isn’t even an iPhone anywhere to be seen. Instead, this is Robin Williams talking to Ellen Degeneres about Siri and how it would sound with a French accent and attitude to life (Williams’ assertion, not mine!). it’s funny if you can excuse the obvious racial stereotyping.

Ultimate Combat Assistant

We have previously seen Siri acting totally psychotic and trying to kill its user, but what if the opposite was true? This video pitches Siri as the ‘Ultimate Combat Assistant’. Attached to a gun, the iPhone and its personal assistant could become a lifesaver. What I love about this video is that it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. Although I suspect we’ll all be wearing our smartphones on our heads soon anyway (with Google Project Glass).

Siri Does Notorious B.I.G.

A simple idea but one that absolutely works as it’s meant to. Siri is able to read text back to you, so anyone who has the time and energy can type the lyrics to a song into their iPhone and have Siri perform a cover of it. Add the original music underneath and you’re good to go. There are quite a few of these videos on YouTube but Siri channeling the spirit of Notorious B.I.G. is my favorite.

Siri Vs. Furby

This is short and sweet but it’s funny enough to be worth watching. Although Siri is very good at understanding commands, it does have its limitations. It doesn’t understand gibberish as spouted by a Furby, for starters. Which makes a conversation between the two a mess. I wish more had been done with this. I’m sure you could get these two to have quite the conversation. It would be unintelligible but it would still count as a conversation.

Siri Vs. Siri

Move Furby out of the way and add another Siri into the mix. Siri meet Siri. Unfortunately Siri and Siri can’t quite understand each other enough to have what I would consider a decent conversation. It quickly slips into a pattern of repeating words and phrases or assuring each other that everything is OK. Any lasting impression you have of Siri as an intelligent program soon fades away.

Evil Siri

Pretty much the first thing everyone did with Siri after the release of the iPhone 4S was to try and trip it up. It’s actually not that hard. Ask Siri a strange question and you’re likely to get just as strange a response. With no emotion and very little contextual understanding it will give you the cold, hard facts. Siri definitely has a dark side.

Siri Argument

This video has already featured on the rundown of ‘10 Hilarious Apple Ad Parodies‘. It shows Siri acting as the go-between in an argument conducted by a married couple. It turns out that Siri isn’t as good a mediator as you may imagine her to be. In fact she makes things a whole lot worse. I guess the lesson to learn from this is not to conduct a relationship via iPhone.

Siri Duet

This video has already featured on the rundown of ‘10 Songs Played On Apple iDevices‘. It shows Jonathan Mann, who is very well known on YouTube for writing and recording a song every day, doing a duet with Siri. I love this song more than I should do. Siri can sing, and Mann is a genius for getting such a great performance out of her.

Conclusions

If you’re as big a user of YouTube as myself then perhaps you have seen other videos featuring Siri which deserve a bigger audience. If so feel free to link to or embed them in the comments section below. If you’re an iPhone 4S user yourself then perhaps you have an experience with Siri you’d like to share. Or even just an opinion on the technology and how Apple is using it. As always we’re keen to hear your thoughts.

The post 10 Funny Videos Featuring Siri On The iPhone 4S appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Our infographic today shows us some of the common uses of Siri and finds that one-third of Siri users don’t use it for anything more than making phone calls, searching the Internet and sending text messages.  Which is a shame because, as Bakari’s article shows, you can use it for many more things that potentially could make your life so much easier. For example, I tell Siri my shopping list and it adds it all to a reminder note. I ask it for a weather forecast every morning, I ask it to do advanced math calculations and conversions. Then there’s always sending emails or telling it to play a song in my music folder.The possibilities are just endless.

Do you have an iPhone 4S?  If so, what do you use Siri for? Does it understand you and your accent, or are there any embarrassing faux-pas that you want to tell us about? If you don’t use Siri at all, tell us why.

Infographic Source: www.onlinedegrees.com

The post Siri, Why Don’t You Understand Me? [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I recently covered a few Siri tips in this recent iOS article. In this post, I will focus on a few location aware tips for Siri, as well as a tip on not getting tongue-tied when talking to the mobile personal assistant.

Adding Locations

You probably already know that you can ask Siri to find the nearest gas station or hamburger joint near your current location, and within a few seconds it will deliver up a list of recommendations with addresses.

But another awesome feature of Siri is how it can get your current location and perform actions based on it. For example, for a few days I had Siri remind me to leave my earphones in my car when I arrived home, otherwise I would take them in the house and end up leaving them on my next trip out.

Sending this reminder to Siri was easy. I simply told it: “Remind me to leave earphones in the car when I arrive home.” Siri of course uses my home address in my iPhone address book to identify that location. It adds the reminder to the Reminders app, which now gets used a lot more since I upgraded to the iPhone 4S.

Get My Current Location

With this location aware feature, you can set up other locations for Siri commands. Do a search and add locations that you regularly visit (e.g. stores, job, school, mall, etc). Or when you’re at a specific location, you might also try sending this command to Siri: “Get my current location.” If you get the results you want, save the information that appears on the map to your contact list.

With specific locations in your Contact list, you can send reminders, such as “Remind me to get milk after I leave California Montessari.” Or, “Remind me to buy a clipboard when I arrive at Staples.” The key to using location reminders with Siri is to use “after I leave” or “when I arrive.” If the specific destination is listed in your Contacts list with an address that Siri recognizes, it will create an appropriate reminder for you.

Building A Shopping List

As I wrote before, you can have Siri add reminders to your Reminders app. But I also realized you can take it one step further and actually have Siri add to specific lists in Reminders. When you launch the Reminders app, you might think there’s only a single list of current reminders that you put there.

But if you tap the the three-line button on the top-left, you can create specific lists on the app. Tap the Edit button on the top-right and then tap “Create New List…” Type in the name for your list, such as Home, Work, Office Store, Groceries, and so on.

You can now tell Siri to add items to a particular list, such as “Add milk to my Groceries list.” This is not a location aware tip for Siri, but it’s a great way to organize and manage your to-dos and reminders. I prefer it to using the Notes app and when Reminders is added to the next version of Apple’s operating system, Mountain Lion, the Reminders app should be even be more useful.

Dictating To Siri

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get a little tongue-tied when I try to dictate commands to Siri. I might try to say something like “text Kevin and ask if he has received my email yet.” That command might not come out the way I intended it to.

I find it better to set up text commands this way. I start off, for example, by saying, “Text Kevin.” And Siri will respond, “What do you want to say to Kevin Carter?” At that point, I can specifically dictate my text message.

The same approach can be used for having Siri add notes to your Notes app.

In the versions to come, Siri will get even more features added to it. But in the meantime we can get comfortable with how to use voice commands rather than typing on the iPhone and other supported devices.

For other ideas using Siri, start with these articles:

• How To Update Your Twitter & Facebook Status With Siri [iPhone 4S]
• 3 New AssistantExtensions Tweaks That Make Siri Better Than Ever [iPhone / Cydia Tweak]
• How To Get the Siri Voice & Make Her Say Whatever You Want [Mac]

Let us know in the comments what type of commands you use with Siri.

The post Getting Location Aware & Other Useful Tips On Getting The Most Out Of Siri [iPhone] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Download The Siri Voice

First things first, let’s get the real Siri voice, though technically her name is Samantha. Voice recognition and text-to-speech – both of which are built into the core OSX – can all be found in System Preferences -> Voice.

On the text-to-speech tab, you’ll see that a voice is already selected – Victoria on mine. Click Play to preview that voice.

As you can tell, this isn’t Siri. To get the Siri (Samantha) voice – or even any number of other available voices – click on the System Voice selection box, and choose Customize. Scroll down to English (United States) – Female, and tick Samantha. If you click OK, it’ll prompt you to download the required files which are about 300-400MB per voice. I believe Daniel is the official Siri voice of the UK, but I must say the other language voices are quite impressive too, so I took the opportunity to grab Ting Ting and Kyoko too.

Wait for the download to complete, then choose Samantha from the drop down.

Get Her To Say What You Want

The Terminal / Command Line is the easiest way to do this. Find it under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal. Type in the following command, replacing the text in quotes with whatever you want Siri to say!

say "Master, my name is Siri. I am here to serve your every desire"

Save The Output

To use the synthesised speech in our project, we need to output it to a file. To do this, add the -o switch the command, followed by a file name.

say -o "filenameGoesHere" "Master, my name is Siri"

Note that when you run this, it will not play the voice – only save to the file. It’s an .aiff file – and by default, it’s going to save in the root of your users’ home directory. To save to the desktop, just issue this command first:

cd Desktop

which will change the current directory to the desktop.

A few more tips – if you have a large amount of text you want to read, save it to the same directory as a plain text file, and instead of specifying the text to say, add the -f switch and the filename of your text file, like this:

say -o "outputFile" -f "inputFile"

To change the voice being used without having to go into System Preferences every time, use the -v switch:

say -v "Daniel" "I am Daniel, the voice of iPhone 4S in Britain"

So, how awesome is this? Very, is the response you’re looking for I believe. If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing the article using the buttons below. If you have any more tips or would like to show off your Siri project in the comments, then go ahead, I’m looking forward to checking them out. Don’t forget to check out all our other Siri related articles too.

The post How To Get the Siri Voice & Make Her Say Whatever You Want [Mac] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Apple’s release of Siri has been met with disappointment from many owners of many Apple devices. Why? Because they can’t use it. Only the iPhone 4S ships with Siri or can be officially updated with it, leaving owners of older iPhones and the iPad (even the new iPad 3) out of luck.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before the feature was unofficially hacked onto other devices. That time has now come thanks to an app called i4Siri. Better still, the people behind the hack have a website with fairly decent instructions about how to install it.

As you might imagine, this won’t work on an Apple device that’s still under Cupertino’s control. You will first need to jailbreak your device. A few quick steps later and – tada! – you have Siri on your previous generation iPhone or iPad.

Like any hack, you may run into problems. The app uses a different server than the Apple version and some people have reported problems connecting to it. The developers swear they’re not logging personal data sent to their server. It’s up to you to decide if you trust them.

You can find instructions for installing i4Siri at the developer’s website. It is free, but donations are encouraged.

Source: Slashgear

The post Want Siri? Don’t have an iPhone 4S? Try i4Siri! [Update] appeared first on MakeUseOf.