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 HomePod update adds Canadian French support, among other new Siri-related features

Apple’s HomePod speaker recently got a software update that brings some useful new features to it. One is that it now gets support for Canadian French in Canada and Spanish in the U.S., Spain, and Mexico. On top of this, you can now ask Siri to do more. You can now ask it to search songs by lyrics (in English), set multiple timers, make or receive calls, help locate your iPhone with Find My iPhone feature, and access Siri Shortcuts. An example Apple gives is, you can say “Hey Siri, good morning” and it can go through your morning routine and do things like “order coffee from a coffee shop’s app, turn on the kitchen lights from the Home app, and share the first few calendar appointments for the day—all with one simple, customizable command.”

Apple hires former Google AI head to bolster machine learning strategy

The technology sector is changing dramatically before our eyes. Fresh from last week's massive Microsoft reorg which saw the Windows group subsumed into various other departments as Microsoft focuses on artifical intelligence, we now have Apple making an addition to its team.

John Giannandrea was previously Google's head of AI. He oversaw the Search team and developed applied AI at Google.  He is considered a heavy hitter in Silicon Valley for his expertise, his background stems back to such noted companies as Netscape and General Magic. Giannandrea will report directly to Tim Cook, and is largely expected to revamp Apple's existing AI products like Siri.

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Apple drops Bing search in Siri and Spotlight in favour of Google

Bing is no longer the default search service used by Siri on iOS and Spotlight in macOS. Apple has moved to Google search as the go-to service.

"Switching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on Mac will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari,” Apple told TechCrunch in a statement.

This means that if Siri does not have the answer to a user's query, then the system with just pull up Google results. 

Investment firm Bernstein estimates Google currently pays Apple around $3bn for this deal, based on the fact Google paid around $1bn for the same deal in 2014 according to The Telegraph.

Source: TechCrunch