Search: siri

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Siri Might be Able to Interpret Your Emotions in The Future

Charlotte Henry ·

Siri may soon be able to interpret your emotions using facial recognition. That’s according to a new patent, reported on by AppleInsider.

Intelligent software agents can perform actions on behalf of a user,” says Apple in US Patent Number 20190348037. “Actions can be performed in response to a natural-language user input, such as a sentence spoken by the user. In some circumstances, an action taken by an intelligent software agent may not match the action that the user intended.” “As an example,” it continues, “the face image in the video input… may be analysed to determine whether particular muscles or muscle groups are activated by identifying shapes or motions.” Part of the system entails using facial recognition to identify the user and so provide customized actions such as retrieving that person’s email or playing their personal music playlists.

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Spanish Siri Brands Bolivian President a 'Dictator'

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple tries to steer clear of political controversy (not always successfully, as we saw with Hong Kong). It probably won’t have gone down well in Cupertino then that the Spanish Siri has been branding controversial Bolivian president Evo Morales a dictator. As Cult of Mac noted, it’s not the first time the virtual assistant has strayed into politics.

Morales recently won a controversial fourth presidential term in Bolivia. However, thousands of citizens have marched across the country decrying voter fraud. It seems that Spanish language Siri was spiritually among them. When asked in Spanish, Siri said that, “The dictator of Bolivia” is Evo Morales. Siri described Morales as president in the English version. The issue was rectified after Apple was notified about it by Reuters. This isn’t the first time one of Siri’s answers has caused problems. For years, users asking about abortion centers were directed toward adoption centers. Apple finally changed this in 2016. More recently, an issue with the Russian version of Siri seemingly resulted in it expressing homophobic sentiments

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iOS 13.2 Will Let You Delete Your Siri Audio History

Andrew Orr ·

The latest Apple betas like iOS 13.2 have a feature that lets you delete your Siri audio history in settings.

In addition to offering an explicit opt-in, Apple has promised that only employees, and not contractors, will be involved in reviewing the audio clips. However, this doesn’t stop the automated text transcriptions of your Siri requests from being transmitted to Apple, irrespective of whether you opt-in or -out, although they will pseudonymized and dissociated from your Apple ID. What’s more, these transcripts could be reviewed by employees and contractors.

I’m glad that Apple is adding this feature, and given its privacy stance I’m surprised it’s a feature we don’t already have.

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Siri Will Work Better With Third-Party Messaging Apps

Andrew Orr ·

Apple said that later this year an iOS update will enable Siri to work better with third-party messaging apps. If you use the assistant to send messages, it will default to whatever message you use the most, instead of defaulting to iMessage or Phone. You can currently use third-party apps with Siri but you have to specify “Send this message via WhatsApp.”

For example, if an iPhone user always messages another person via WhatsApp, Siri will automatically launch WhatsApp, rather than iMessage. It will decide which service to use based on interactions with specific contacts. Developers will need to enable the new Siri functionality in their apps. This will be expanded later to phone apps for calls as well.

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Neato Robot Vacuums Can Use Siri Shortcuts

Andrew Orr ·

Neato robotic vacuums can use Siri Shortcuts and HomeKit, like starting, pausing, and stopping cleaning later this year.

Zone cleaning lets you deploy the vacuum to specific, targeted areas of your house so they get cleaned more readily, and it sounds like you’ll be able to set up Siri shortcuts for specific zones. That should let user use voice commands to send the vacuum to different parts of the house, a pretty handy feature. And if you’re not so much into the voice commands, Siri Shortcuts will enable the Neato app to learn and suggest times to send out your vacuum with lock screen suggestions.

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News+: Personalize Siri and Search

Andrew Orr ·

In the June issue of MacFormat magazine we find out how to personalize Siri and Search by changing certain settings. It’s on page 52 (it’s a PDF).

Siri takes repetition, the time of day and your location into account for its suggestions. As well as the Lock screen, suggestions can appear in iOS’s search results and in iOS’s Look Up feature. You may want to stop info from some apps leaking out onto the Lock screen in particular, so we’ll show you how.

This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.