After rolling out a beta of Cortana for iOS to a limited number of beta testers in late-November, Microsoft today released the software to everyone via the App Store.
A free download, Cortana for iOS helps you get things done “by letting your PC and iPhone work together,” as per the official description. The app takes advantage of your schedule, interests, contacts and reminders to deliver personalized results.
What are you waiting for? Go ahead and give Cortana a try right now!
Following its announcement earlier in the month that Cortana for iOS would soon launch for a limited number of beta testers, Microsoft has now made good on that promise and started rolling out the beta software, TechCrunch reported this past weekend.
Cortana for iOS looks just like the Windows 10 Mobile and Android equivalents, and works in a very similar way, with a few exceptions stemming from Apple-imposed restrictions on third-party iOS app development.
Microsoft today announced that a limited number of iPhone owners in the United States and China can now sign up to test-drive the first public beta of its personal digital assistant, called Cortana. “Over the coming months, we’ll continue to deliver frequent updates to the app to expand the features and functionality,” notes the Windows maker.
While Cortana offers the most complete experience on Windows devices due to its tight integration with Microsoft's operating system and Apple-imposed restrictions related to iOS development, Cortana for iOS does take the intelligence of its Windows counterpart and brings that experience to the user's iPhone.
Apple's introduction of Siri back in 2011 was a watershed moment for voice-activated personal digital assistants. Today, a myriad of Siri-like services exist such as Google Now on Android devices and Microsoft's cross-platform Cortana, which will be hitting iOS soon following Windows 10 debut on July 29.
But many if not all of the existing services, Siri included, could be put to shame by Hound.
Hound is a forthcoming digital assistant which promises a groundbreaking smartphone experience, created by SoundHound, the maker of namesake mobile music and audio recognition service.
I'm not really sure what to think about Amazon's crazy connected speaker with built-in personal digital assistant. What I do know is that the Echo could be a close approximation of what a next-generation Apple TV with built-in Siri might be like. Taking another swing at hardware, the Echo is well designed: it sports both sexy looks and the smarts.
It's also got a few cool tricks up its sleeve to dazzle unsuspecting users. In a nutshell, the Echo will talk to you, play music, read your news headlines, check the weather, find facts online — and also sell you things — for $199.
Five days after Facebook announced its $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in February of this year, the world's most popular messaging platform announced plans to enable voice calling in the first half of this year.
The summer came and went and here we are well into the third quarter of 2014 and now WhatsApp is saying that the planned release has been pushed back.
Citing a series of technical challenges, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said during his presentation at the Code/Mobile conference this week that the VoIP calling service will make its debut in WhatsApp mobile apps in the first quarter of 2015.
Almost a year following the public release of iOS 7, Google Voice has finally been refreshed with the revamped user interface to match Apple's guidelines for iOS 7 development.
Now available in the App Store, Google Voice 1.6 also brings support for Google Voice integration in Hangouts and the obligatory bug fixes and performance improvements.
Earlier this morning, the search company issued an update to Hangouts for the iPhone and iPad which enabled free and low-cost VoIP calling to your Hangouts friends and mobile/landline numbers around the world.
As suspected, the Internet giant Google on Wednesday has finally gotten around refreshing its free of charge Hangouts mobile application for the iPhone and iPad with the ability to make phone calls to anyone on your Hangouts contact list, using the new voice-calling feature.
As part of its staggered shuttering of the Voice app, “starting today you can make voice calls from Hangouts on Android, iOS and the web,” wrote the search giant in a post over at the Official Google Blog.
Calling landline and mobile phone numbers in the United States and Canada is free, with the international calling rates starting at a ridiculously low one cent per minute.
With precisely two weeks until Apple's rumored September 9 iPhone 6 announcement, the nation's leading carrier, Verizon Wireless, Tuesday morning announced the official beginning of nationwide Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology roll-out. The carrier in May laid out plans to deploy VoLTE using the AMR-wideband standard.
VoLTE uses high-speed 4G LTE data network to carry voice instead of the legacy circuit-switched voice network. Verizon says users can expect to enjoy higher-fidelity voice calls ”in the coming weeks.“
Additionally, the Big Red carrier said the feature will be enabled on supported devices via a software update.
OS X includes a nifty Dictation feature which allows you to control your Mac and apps with your voice. You can use “speakable items”, basically a set of spoken commands, to open apps, choose menu items, email contacts and convert whole spoken sentences to text, wherever you can type text.
This is much like iOS’s Dictation feature as both iOS and OS X use the same Nuance-powered technology that turns speech to text. iOS devices have limited computing power so the Dictation feature on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad requires network connectivity in iOS 7 (iOS 8 supports streaming voice recognition and 22 new languages).
On the Mac, computing resources like CPU power, battery life and RAM are not of paramount importance as on mobile, Therefore, OS X Mavericks provides a new Enhanced Dictation feature which converts your words to text without utilizing Apple’s servers.
In other words, server-based Dictation lets you dictate without an active Internet connection. Because voice recognition processing runs locally on your Mac, text appears instantly as you speak. That is: continuos, streaming dictation with live feedback is made possible.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to turn on Enhanced Dictation in OS X and take advantage of speech-to-text, even when you're off the grid...
Having unceremoniously removed voice messaging from the recently remastered Skype 5.0 for iPhone, the Microsoft-owned VoIP provider on Monday pushed a minor update that has brought the useful feature back while adding two others.
The new Skype 5.2 for iPhone is rolling out this morning. In addition to voice messaging, the refreshed Skype app has also brought back the ability to access contact profiles while allowing you to add participants to the existing conversation at any time...
As we've written before, Apple has created Siri in a modular manner, so that it could easily replace her Nuance-powered speech recognition engine with a similar piece of software. Siri since its inception has been reliant on Nuance technology, but things look to be changing sooner than later.
The company is reportedly assembling an in-house team of speech synthesis and voice recognition experts tasked with developing a proprietary technology that could supplant Nuance and give the personal assistant a “neural network” boost...