Hasta La Gadget!

The best part of CES each year isn’t seeing the latest and greatest gadgets you’re going to buy that year — it’s seeing the burgeoning developments that are going to change how you use those devices in the future. Audience’s …

Siri, the virtual private assistant that lives inside quite a few iOS devices, can do much more today as opposed to when it was originally launched. Over the years Apple has improved this service greatly, and a new patent filing reveals the possibility that the company might be considering making Siri capable of sorting through photos stored on an iOS device. Titled “Voice-Based Image Tagging and Searching,” the patent describes a method in which “natural language” text strings are attached with photos saved on a mobile device.

The strings can cover an activity, location or an entity, thus making it easier for users to sort and search photos on their devices, this would be particularly useful for those who tend to take a lot of photos. For example, if a photo is tagged with a string which goes like “This is me at the beach,” simply including this string in a relevant voice command given to Siri would bring up all photos tagged with it. An example mentioned in the patent describes that simply asking the device to “Show me photos of me at the beach,” would let Siri to bring up related items. Apple filed this patent earlier in the year, in March to be precise. So far this feature has not made it to iOS, and there’s no way to be certain when it ultimately will.

Apple Patent Details Siri’s Ability To Sort Through iOS Photos original content from Ubergizmo.

On my way to the theater, I asked Siri about the movie Her, and she got confused. "What kind of businesses are you looking for?" Siri replied in her always off-kilter robotic murmur. I barked back some line about Siri being stupid. She cracked some stupid joke. And my phone went back into my pocket.

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Siri is Apple’s attempt at providing a voice assistant to its iOS users. While Siri’s original demonstration looked impressive, in real-life it certainly did not live up to the hype, leading some to accuse Apple of false advertising, which then lead to Apple putting a “beta” tag on Siri, which has since been removed presumably because it’s supposed to work better now. Personally I have found Siri to be slightly more responsive compared to before, and it certainly does a better job at more accurately recognizing my voice, and according to Piper Jaffray analyst, Gene Munster, the reason could be due to Apple’s reduced reliance on Google.

According to Munster’s latest report card on Siri as we can see above, Siri’s ability to hear and interpret correctly has increased compared to previous months and years, and before iOS 7 was released. Munster believes that this is due to Apple relying less on Google to provide results, and instead turning to alternatives such as Bing, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and etc. In fact based on his findings, only 4% of Siri’s answers came from Google, versus 27% from back in December of 2012. What do you guys think? Do you agree with Munster’s report that Siri has become more accurate from before?

Siri’s Improved Accuracy Is Reportedly Due To Less Reliance On Google original content from Ubergizmo.

One of the cooler aspects of the Moto X is the fact that the phone is always listening to you. Paranoia, invasion of privacy, and government spying allegations aside, this is an incredibly handy feature as it does not require you to wake up the phone to use it or to perform simple tasks. Well it looks like Apple might have such an idea too, except that instead of a phone, it will be a dock. According to the patent, it describes a “smart dock for activating a voice recognition mode of a portable electronic device.” So similar to the Moto X, this smart dock will be always listening to you and will look out for particular commands to activate it, such as “OK Siri” or something to that effect.

If there’s one drawback to Siri it is that it requires you to activate it, which is either to lift the phone to your ear, or press and hold the home button. This feels less efficient compared to the Moto X and to Android 4.4 KitKat in the Nexus 5 which allows you to activate Google’s voice search by saying “OK Google” from the home screen. Assuming this smart dock is an actual product that Apple is working on, rather than just one of the many ideas the Cupertino company has, we can imagine how useful it will be. What do you guys think? Is this an iPhone dock you could get on board with?

Apple Patent Describes A Smart Dock That Is Always Listening To You original content from Ubergizmo.