November 2011

Siri, Please Teach Google Voice to Listen

November 22, 2011

Sometimes using one’s smartphone is like playing a game of, well, “telephone.” Half the time no one can hear you and when they can, the message gets lost in translation – even when it’s not actually being translated. I’m convinced that mine is actually a “smart-ass phone” given how it willfully drops calls, truncates texts [...]

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Getting Siri-ous

November 20, 2011

Building real-time voice-recognition into our gadgets has been a holy grail for technologists ever since an onscreen superhero commanded an artificial intelligence to do his bidding in some sepia-toned sci-fi serial. Who this first human-computer interlocutor was, exactly, is lost to the annals of speculative fiction, though its echoes can be heard from Star Trek to the [...]

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Tipply Tributes: Celebrity Beer Names

November 11, 2011

For your typical celebrity, it’s to be expected that one day someone is going to name a sandwich or some other edible after you. Every deli menu in Hollywood boasts some kind of transubstantiation of stars into grub. In the world of cocktails, oddly, they’re usually of the non-alcoholic variety (“Shirley Temple,” “Roy Rogers”). On [...]

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