Yesterday’s Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) announced a range of enhancements to its software development platforms, including a completely new filesystem, Apple File System (APFS), to succeed HFS+ which has been in use since 1998. Embed from Getty Images Times have changed since the days of spinning hard drives and floppy disks, and APFS is designed to reflect that. The […]
Amazon’s announcement of Echo last week came as a surprise to many. Think Siri or Cortana, except it’s not just another app on a device. Instead it comes in its own standalone hardware: a cylindrical audio interface, i.e. a speaker with seven embedded microphones which is always listening, ready to respond when you use a keyword to awaken it. If that […]
Here’s a voice that may sound eerily familiar. Susan Bennett is a voiceover artist who did a series of recordings in 2005 for Apple. Later, she was surprised to hear her voice used for Siri, iPhone’s ‘intelligent assistant’. She told CNN that it took a month of daily four-hour sessions to capture all the possible vocalisations required […]
Cortana is Windows Phone’s natural language virtual assistant – the counterpart to Apple’s Siri and Google Now. Microsoft have just released an ad demonstrating Cortana on a Nokia Lumia 635 in action against Siri on an iPhone 5S. http://youtu.be/w0pjD4qpIpg Of course, any ad will select the scenario which best showcases its product, but Microsoft’s message is clear: they’re […]
There’s quite a few mixes out there that people have created using ringtones. This one is pretty damn good:
