Way back on April 10, 2009, I decided to round up some interesting stories from the past week and link to them in a post called In the news. Today’s post is the 400th edition of In the news. (For some background on these posts, see In the news #100.) So much has changed in the iPhone universe in the 8+ years since that first post. Here is one example that was in the news this week: Siri. Apple introduced Siri in October 2011 with the iPhone 4S and iOS 5. Since then, Siri has gotten a lot smarter, but Siri also sounds different as Apple has improved the voice. Apple now publishes an online publication called the Machine Learning Journal, which features academic articles on artificial intelligence. The latest edition features an article from the Siri Team. Most of the article is rather technical, but I encourage you to look at the article and scroll down to the very end to the section called “A New Voice.” That part of the article features phrases with multiple play buttons so that you can hear what Siri sounds like in iOS 9, in iOS 10, and in the upcoming iOS 11 that Apple is expected to release in just a few weeks. One thing that you cannot miss is that the new female voice in iOS 11 is a very different voice from iOS 10. The original Siri voice was in iOS 5, based on voice recordings by Susan Bennett. (Here is a TEDx presentation by Bennett giving some details on that.) Starting with iOS 7, Apple stopped using Bennett’s voice recordings, but every Siri voice up to iOS 10 sounded to me like an incremental change from iOS 5. That’s changing now. As the article states: “For iOS 11, we chose a new female voice talent with the goal of improving the naturalness, personality, and expressivity of Siri’s voice. We evaluated hundreds of candidates before choosing the best one. Then, we recorded over 20 hours of speech and built a new TTS [text-to-speech] voice using the new deep learning based TTS technology. As a result, the new US English Siri voice sounds better than ever.” It will take some time to get used to this new Siri, but such is the price of progress. And now, here is the news of note from the past week:
- California attorney David Sparks and Florida attorney Katie Floyd released one of my all-time favorite episodes of their long-running Mac Power Users podcast this week. In episode 392, the topic is must-have iOS utilities, and they discuss a ton of useful apps. All of the apps are listed in the show notes, but you need to listen to the episode to hear about what these apps can do. There are some real gems in there.
- Speaking of podcasts, the latest episode of Brett Burney’s Apps in Law podcast includes an interview with St. Louis attorney Todd Hendrickson who talks about the fantastic Trial Pad app.
- On Brett Burney’s Apps in Law website, he discusses Timeline 3D for iOS, an app that you can use to create timelines that you can use in court.
- Chicago attorney John Voorhees of MacStories discusses Luna Display, a hardware accessory that turns your iPad into a second display for your Mac.
- Speaking of John Voorhees, on August 22, the aforementioned David Sparks recommended TextTool 2, an $4.99 iOS app with lots of tools for manipulating text. On David’s recommendation, I bought the app that same day. I barely had a chance to use the app before David posted on August 23 that the developer had discontinued the app, and I see that it is no longer on the App Store. Well, so much for that five dollars. David then recommended a $2.99 app called Clean Text, which was recommended to David by John Voorhees. I purchased Clean Text, and I actually like it much better then the recently deceased TextTool 2. It does a great job of cleaning up text. Plus it has the added advantage of still being alive on the App Store — always a useful feature for an app.
- Brian X. Chen of the New York Times discusses some of the features that have made the iPhone great for the past 10 years. He also says that sources tell him that Apple will soon announce a premium version of the iPhone that will start at $999. (Since Apple already uses “Pro” to designate premium versions of other products such as the iPad, my guess is that this will be called the iPhone Pro.)
- What do you do when you, or your client, needs to access data on an iPhone of someone who is deceased? Joseph Keller of iMore has a few tips that might work.
- John Gruber of Daring Fireball discusses AccuWeather’s response to the discovery that its app was sending locating-identifying information to a company that makes money from that information, even if you turned-off location tracking in the app.
- Joseph Keller of iMore discusses some of the best apps for writing text on an iPad.
- I’ve been trying out the beta version of iOS 11 on an old iPad. I love it, but there is a learning curve associated with the new features. Realizing this, Apple produced six short, informative, and entertaining videos called How to do even more with iPad Pro and iOS 11. I strongly recommend that you look at them to get a sense of how things will change on the iPad in just a few weeks.
- David Chartier also created a good video showing how you can use one hand to do multitasking on an iPad in iOS 11.
- It was fun to experience the partial eclipse in New Orleans earlier this week. But after reading this fantastic report by David Pogue of Yahoo, who saw the full total eclipse in Tennessee, I can’t help but consider traveling to the path of totality in 2024.
- And finally, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal offers some good advice for managing notifications on the iPhone in this video: