Siri leaves beta, enters manhood - CNN.COM
  CNN Tech By Heather Kelly, CNN updated 7:00 PM EDT, Tue 
September 17, 2013 Filed under: Mobile
  The updated Siri can adjust iPhone settings, do Bing searches 
for The updated Siri can adjust iPhone settings, do Bing searches 
for "wombats" and look through Twitter.
  (CNN) - When Siri, the voice "assistant" on the iPhone, made 
its debut in 2011, it was welcomed as futuristic way to interact 
with our gadgets.  You could ask it simple questions, banter and 
flirt, or launch applications with one push of a button and 
without slogging through touchscreen menus.
  Two years later, Apple is giving Siri a major overhaul as part 
of Thursday's upgrade to its iOS 7 mobile operating system, and 
it's marking the occasion by finally dropping Siri's "beta" 
label.  (Calling software beta usually means it is still a work 
in progress and that the company is ironing out any bugs.)
  What else has changed in the full-fledged, non-beta Siri? The 
most obvious update is that it has added an option for a male 
voice.  iPhone owners in the UK already had a male Siri voice, 
but this is the first time it will be available in American 
English and German, with more languages expected to get their own 
male versions in the near future.
  Hands-on impressions of the new iPhones
  The voice gender can be swapped on the phone by going to 
Settings greater-than General greater-than Siri.  The female 
voice has also been improved to sound a little more natural.
  Though Siri's new male voice is a few octaves lower, the words 
and answers seem to stay the same.  Guy Siri still has the same 
canned responses to joke questions like "What are you wearing?" 
("Aluminosilicate glass and aluminum.  Nice, huh?") and the 
phrasing of its answers to real questions doesn't seem to change 
between the male and female settings.
  Visually, Siri has been overhauled so its design on the phone's 
screen is more in line with iOS 7's flattened look.  Instead of a 
dark gray background sliding up from the bottom, it throws a 
translucent blurred background over whatever screen is on your 
phone when you launch Siri.  It shows a single wavy line that 
moves as it registers your voice.
  Siri has added Twitter and Wikipedia integration, so you can 
ask to see recent tweets about a hot news story or see the 
Wikipedia entry for something specific without leaving the Siri 
interface.  You can ask to see what's trending on Twitter, tweets 
for a specific hashtag, or simply, "What's going on?"
  New iPhone hardware, software a boon for gamers
  Siri has also expanded its powers to include control of common 
iPhone settings, something that was noticeably missing in beta 
Siri.  You can now turn settings like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and 
off, change your screen brightness, turn on Do Not Disturb or 
view a specific app's settings.  If you use the new iTunes Radio 
feature, you can vocally express your enthusiasm or displeasure 
with specific songs to customize music stations.
  One of the biggest challenges facing new Siri is some serious 
competition from Google.  Slowly and with less fanfare, Google 
has been building up its own powerful natural-language voice 
search in recent years.  Although it lacks a catchy 
anthropomorphic name, Google Voice Search takes on many of the 
same tasks as Siri.  In addition to typical Google search 
results, it pulls answers from Gmail, Google Calendar and other 
Google accounts the way Siri does from the e-mail, contacts and 
calendar apps on the iPhone.
  Google Voice Search is less chatty, but by cutting out extra 
words it is sometimes faster to return an answer.  It cannot be 
used to control phone settings or launch applications on an 
iPhone, but if you are a Google Account user it is a legitimate 
alternative for tasks like calendaring.
  The competition between the two companies helps explain the new 
Siri's most unfortunate change.  Siri has dropped Google as its 
default search engine of choice and switched to Microsoft's Bing.  
When a question can't be answered by Siri itself or a Wikipedia 
entry, it will pull up web results from Bing directly in Siri.  
Unlike in Safari, there's no way to switch the default search 
engine to Google.
  Keeping answers in Siri does save time, however.  Previously a 
Siri Web search would launch Google in Safari, requiring you to 
unlock the phone.
  But don't dismay, Google fans.  You can still ask Siri to 
"Google" something, and it will launch Safari and do a regular 
Google search.


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