Hotels.com gets Siri Shortcut

Tracking down your hotel booking on Hotels.com is going to be an easier, hands-free experience with support for Siri Shortcut. The company boasts it’s one of the first travel companies to support Siri Shortcut on its mobile app. If you’ve already updated to iOS 12, all you need to do is open the Hotels.com app and click the “Add to Siri” button and record the voice command relevant to your stay.

Daniel Craig, VP of Mobile at Hotels.com brand explains: “How many times have you arrived at an airport, with your hands full of luggage and you can’t find your confirmation email or print out—it’s now voice to the rescue! The Hotels.com Siri Shortcut takes the hassle out of travelling, by surfacing the key information you need in just one voice command. Handsfree travel is a growing trend and this new feature is perfect for today’s on-the-go travellers, who demand instant information at their fingertips, or should I now say at the tip of their tongue!”

Apple and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson make ‘movie’ for Siri

In this weird modern world, we have celebrities who are willing to call a 3 minute and 46 second ad as the “biggest, coolest, sexiest, funnest movie ever.” This is how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson describes the new ad with Apple called The Rock x Siri: Dominate The Day. It’s basically a four-minute gag showing off how hard The Rock works with the help of Siri, who always seems to be respond without fail to his queries and requests. Now, we wish Siri would actually be that accurate in real life.

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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