Silver aluminum, once the defining look of Apple products, has been met with increasing variety over the last several years by a range of colors and finishes that customers can choose from. One of the earliest and most popular options – space gray – has permeated across almost every product line Apple offers.
Yet, ubiquity has not brought consistency. Each new generation of a product seems to bring with it a slightly different take on space gray. Those with large device collections have noted the discrepancies between shades, and discussions brew online over the term’s exact definition.
The phrase “Hey Siri” was originally chosen to be as natural as possible; in fact, it was so natural that even before this feature was introduced, users would invoke Siri using the home button and inadvertently prepend their requests with the words, “Hey Siri.” Its brevity and ease of articulation, however, bring to bear additional challenges. In particular, our early offline experiments showed, for a reasonable rate of correctly accepted invocations, an unacceptable number of unintended activations. Unintended activations occur in three scenarios - 1) when the primary user says a similar phrase, 2) when other users say “Hey Siri,” and 3) when other users say a similar phrase. The last one is the most annoying false activation of all. In an effort to reduce such False Accepts (FA), our work aims to personalize each device such that it (for the most part) only wakes up when the primary user says “Hey Siri.” To do so, we leverage techniques from the field of speaker recognition.
Apple Turkey this week posted a series of short commercials to its regional YouTube page featuring the new 9.7-inch iPad and Apple Pencil, positioning the device pairing as an ideal learning and creativity platform for students.
An upgraded Apple News app with the subscription offering is expected to launch within the next year, and a slice of the subscription revenue will go to magazine publishers that are part of the program, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private plans. Apple declined to comment.
Then, Negroponte and Annan rose for a photo-op with two OLPC laptops, and reporters urged them to demonstrate the machines’ distinctive cranks. Annan’s crank handle fell off almost immediately. As he quietly reattached it, Negroponte managed half a turn before hitting the flat surface of the table. He awkwardly raised the laptop a few inches, trying to make space for a full rotation. “Maybe afterwards…” he trailed off, before sitting back down to field questions from the crowd.
The moment was brief, but it perfectly foreshadowed how critics would see One Laptop Per Child a few years later: as a flashy, clever, and idealistic project that shattered at its first brush with reality.