The Future Is Here Today...Robots, Genetics, AI, Longevity, Singularity

Siri iphone App

Give Siri a command and it will hunt down information on Yelp, MovieTickets.com, Google Maps, etc to get you what you want. Amazing.

You’re about to get your very own genie in a bottle. Simply talk into your iPhone and tell Siri what you want. Tickets for a show, reservations at a restaurant, a taxi to pick you up – the newest App can arrange to get you what you need. Best of all, Siri learns (with your permission) what you want, and gets better at understanding your commands. Just like a human assistant. Originally developed as part of DARPA’s CALO project, Siri represent more than five years of steady research and refinement. The App is sophisticated enough to filter through a sentence and identify the relevant key words and know which of its dozens of partnered APIs to engage. Want to find some live music in your area? Siri calls up LiveKick and understands to use GPS to determine what “in your area” means. It can handle most any command for six broad categories of interest: restaurants, movies, events, taxis, local information, and weather. In those fields, Siri can figure out what you want and how to get it for you. Best of all, the App is free. Look below for the cool demo video and a great interview of Siri founders by the Scobleizer himself.

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by Aaron Saenz on January 28th, 2010
steve jobs

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad yesterday. Check out the videos below to see what he said.

Most of us probably weren’t able to make it to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco yesterday. Even if you were there, you probably didn’t get to go inside the Apple Store because of the massive security. As such, you missed the chance to see Steve Jobs’ introduction for the Apple iPad first hand. Well, worry no more Apple fans, the video of that presentation is now available for you to salivate over. Jobs walks us through the reasoning behind the device, its goals, and how it will blow the competition away. It’s not like this is some sort of historical event, but it is really cool to watch. Check out the video after the break.

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date check from intelius

Ignore the catch line. Intelius has far bigger goals than just a dating App.

Maybe you’ve dated someone you shouldn’t have. Sometimes that means getting bored or a little inconvenienced. For a friend of mine that meant being lied to by a con-artist for months in his elaborate ruse to get money. It’s a tough world out there so information snooping website Intelius is offering Date Check, a new sort of free App for your iPhone, Android, or (soon) BlackBerry. Using just an email address or phone number, Date Check lets you search for someone’s criminal record, investigate their living situation, scan through their social networking, and browse other public information. It’s the online equivalent of a full body frisk. Maybe not the most romantic thing to do to someone you’re hoping to have a nice meal with, but it could be helpful to people hoping to avoid being conned. Check out the video from Intelius after the break.

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Gather up any presents you may have received this winter, return them to the store, and take the cash. The ultimate gadget has just arrived. Parrot, a French company better known for making sleek Bluetooth accessories, has released videos of its latest product: a four-prop quadricopter with video cameras that you control with your iPhone. This isn’t some dinky mall-bought plaything, the AR-Drone from Parrot has amazing controls, great vertical movement capabilities, and it relays video straight to your phone via WiFi. It’s a retail spy-drone. And it plays augmented reality video games. That’s right, you can play AR video games using the drone’s camera while it’s in flight. I am totally floored. Check out the flight video, and the AR game video after the break.

iPhone's never seen such a bad-ass accessory. Bad-ass-essory?

iPhone's never seen such a bad-ass accessory. Bad-ass-essory?

The AR-Drone is amazingly similar to the military drone controlled by an iPhone at MIT. The MIT drone has slightly better programming (it can run patrols or surveillance sweeps) but otherwise the two seem nearly identical. That’s incredible. Parrot is selling a near-military quality drone. There are so many ways, mostly legal, that AR-Drone could be used. Surely the majority of people will want a cool RC helicopter that plays AR games. But I can bet that militias, civilian border patrols, and other para-military groups are going to want to get their hands on this as well. Easy to control but high quality retail drones like this one could change the way we view household robots – they’re not just for play anymore.

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Ustream Live Broadcaster is the first such app approved for sale at the App store.

Ustream Live Broadcaster is available for free at the App store.

Technology is turning us all into miniature media moguls. For those that want to share moments of their lives as they happen, recording video and uploading it later is simply too slow of a process. They need streaming video and they need it know. Luckily iPhone can finally help them out. While Ustream has had a broadcast streaming video application for Nokia and Android phones for months, the iPhone version just came out earlier in December. With Ustream Live Broadcaster, users can upload and record live video to the web, alert their social networks (via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube), and archive their work for later. Best yet, Ustream offers the application for free.

There are other live video phone applications. Qik is available on many phone platforms, and can be used on the iPhone, but only if you hack it. Knocking Live Video will share streaming video, but only between one mobile and another. Ustream is the first one to many broadcasting iPhone App approved by Apple, which means it’s the first that is likely to dominate the market. That market is set to increase in the years to come. Already we’ve seen how life recording and other extreme sharing concepts are gaining ground, it’s probably only a matter of time before broadcasting events is as popular as texting about them on Facebook and Twitter. I wonder how the next generation’s concepts about privacy will change with this new technology. A new sense of what is private is bound to shape everything from job hunting to airport screening. It’s going to get harder to tell governments, and employers, they can’t hunt for information when we’re all sharing it freely online.

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Can’t afford a stenographer? Well now iPhone has an App for that. Nuance, the creators of the successful Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation software have expanded into mobile service. Dragon Dictation is now available for free on the App store and it brings all of the high quality speech recognition you’d expect from Nuance and puts it in the palm of your hand. Dictations up to 30 minutes can be converted to writing and then emailed, texted, or copied to the clipboard for later use. Check out the demo video from Nuance after the break.

Dragon Dictation lets you record up to 30 minutes of text, edit it, then send it via SMS, email, or your iPhone's clipboard.

Dragon Dictation lets you record speech, edit , and send via SMS, email, or clipboard.

Dragon Dictation has most of the features you’d want in a speech to text App. It allows you to edit converted text easily. It let’s you cut and paste text into other Apps. It can’t directly interact with other applications, but that’s Apple’s fault (damn the ‘no Apps running in the background’ restriction). DD is also fairly quick. Wifi connections allow for text conversions to happen in a second or less. 3G connections bring that time up to around three seconds or so (depending on connection). As speech recognition technology improves further it’s going to become even more universal. The new 3GS iPhone has voice command capabilities and Nuance provides the voice command routines for the Samsung Rogue (see the second video below). We’re likely to see the smart phones of the future run on a combination of touch, talk, and physical movement.

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All right tech fans, put on your happy faces and get ready to smile because video calls just arrived on your smartphone…and they’re free. Proud owners of iPhone (3GS), iPod touch, and Nokia’s Symbian S60 can now use their internet connectivity to make video calls to other mobile users with Fring. Fring is an aggregate social networking application that allows you to channel all of your Facebook, Twitter, Skype, ICQ, etc contacts into one program on your phone. As mentioned in their recent press release, Fring has expanded into video VoIP and now users can enjoy one-way (iPhone) or two-way (Symbian) video calls with mobile and land line contacts (through data streams, not standard phone connectivity). Watch the demonstration videos below to see how it works. There are still some bugs and limitations, but Fring has broke ground as the first application based (aka softphone) video conferencing service for your mobile. Rejoice, technophiles. Rejoice.

The newest application from Fring allows your  iPhone (or Nokia Symbian) to make video calls.

The newest application from Fring allows your iPhone (or Nokia Symbian) to make video calls.

What’s the biggest limitation? Well iPhone users will notice that their cameras only point in one direction, making two-way video calls impossible. For now, those who download the free Fring iPhone App will simply have to be satisfied with watching their friends’ faces while remaining hidden. However, I am making a prediction: iPhones will have two-way cameras by 2011. It’s got to happen. There’s too much to gain by enabling video calls for Apple to ignore the hardware upgrade. Look at Symbian, whose cameras allow for nice two-way video calls. That sort of capability is going to become more important in the days ahead.

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Will the iPhone be the Universal Translator of the future?

Will the iPhone be the Universal Translator of the future?

When watching Star Trek, I was always amazed that the aliens all spoke English. Writers explained this happy coincidence by the presence of a universal translator (UT), a portable device which could take any language and translate it into any other language as needed. Our nonfictional modern world has more than 20,000 different languages (if you include dialects) in its history. With the rise of globalization we desperately need an universal translator to help us speak to one another. Luckily, there are several different companies that are taking the first steps to creating an UT. Sahkr and Jibbigo have developed iPhone Apps which transform the smart phone into a handheld speech to speech translator. Check out some of their demo videos after the break.

Computer aided speech to speech translation isn’t easy. You need speech recognition, language analysis, machine translation, language generation, and speech synthesis. We’ve had limited handheld translators for some time. Devices like Voxtec’s Phraselator allow you to select a range of sentences and have them translated into many different languages. We’ve also had more complex non-portable systems (like IBM’s MASTOR) which can do nearly full translation. But the products created by Sahkr and Jibbigo represent a new paradigm in speech to speech: commonly used hardware devices adapted solely through software. By integrating into an existing hardware platform, these next generation programs are taking us one step closer to having a universal translator that anyone can carry in their hands.

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“Mmmm…what’s that smell…cookies? Campfire? Nerve gas? I know, I’ll just ask my phone.”

NASA developed a chemical detector that plugs into an iPhone (left). It already looks more hi-tech than a tricorder (right).

NASA developed a chemical detector that plugs into an iPhone (left). It already looks more hi-tech than a tricorder from Star Trek (right).

A researcher at the NASA Ames Center has developed a proof of concept device which can convert an iPhone into a chemical sensor capable of detecting ammonia, chlorine gas, and methane. The chem sniffing device is a small silicon chip (no bigger than a stamp) that plugs into the phone. Upon detection, the chip uses the phone to alert others. It was developed as part of Homeland Security’s Cell-All program. The US hopes that one day a small, inexpensive, and portable chip such as this one could be used to turn thousands (or millions) of mobile phones into a means of quickly detecting hazardous chemicals in public environments. That detection could save lives and help direct first response units. Of course, for the nerds out there the device’s true importance is easy to see: it’s the next step to developing a tricorder from Star Trek.

For those of you who don’t regularly attend conventions wearing pointy ears, a tricorder is a fictional device from the Star Trek universe. It’s the go-to scientific field instrument that identifies…well pretty much anything – alien life forms, rare minerals, the composition of the air. Your tricorder probes and samples its environment and tells you what’s around you. The NASA device does the same thing, albeit for a much smaller set of substances. Still, it’s the first of many steps to developing a handheld device that can measure the world in a scientific way. Right now, Homeland Security has plans to use the chem sniffer in an anti-terrorist detection program (more below) but one day we could see advanced versions helping us measure air quality, determine UV exposure, or tell us if there’s any dairy, nuts, or gluten in our meals. The tricorder would put scientific examination in the palm of our hands.

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by Aaron Saenz on November 12th, 2009
Immense technical knowledge and computational power? iPhone has an App for that.

Immense technical knowledge and computational power? iPhone has an App for that.

You know, if computers ever take over the world, it’s not going to be through a super smart spaceship like HAL, or a global network like SkyNet, or even Asimov-defying robots. No, it will be the iPhone. Those little handheld gadgets, not even the most popular smart phones, by the way, have so many insane applications that they’re getting dangerous. They can control your bank account, fly military drones, and now they even have access to the data and calculation power of Wolfram Alpha. Built off of their API, the Wolfram Alpha iPhone App lets you find visual answers to computational and statistical questions. What’s the rainfall in India like? How do I mix cyanide in water to get a 3 molar solution? Now you, or your Apple overlord, can find these answers on the go.

Wolfram Alpha, though trailing in popularity since its debut this summer has continued to impress us with the range of its technical knowledge. Sure, for the casual user, finding the population of North Dakota is as easy in Wikipedia, Google, or Yahoo as it is in Wolfram Alpha. But what about the hyper tangent of three times pi? Or the rate at which GDP has changed in Belgium over the past 23 years? As an open resource, the internet is evolving. Yes, we’ll always be able to get celebrity gossip, but as WA and other technically impressive sites evolve, so too will the level of available expertise. If we choose to use it.

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Need a ride? iPhone has an App for that.

Need a ride? iPhone has an App for that.

Like peanut butter and chocolate, Batman and Robin, or babies and puppies, some things are just more powerful when combined. So it is with the iPhone and Zipcar. For those of you who don’t live in a major US metropolitan area, Zipcar is a car sharing company that allows users to locate, drive, and return a car without a traditional rental facility. iPhones, of course, are all powerful hand held devices that can do practically anything if you write a software application for them. Now, those Zipcar members that have an iPhone can use it to make a reservation, find their car, honk its horn, and even open its doors. It’s a cool upgrade for an already cool system. Check out USA Today’s video with Luke Schneider, CTO of Zipcar, after the break.

Car sharing is an eco-friendly, traffic cutting, and democratic approach to transportation, and Zipcar is the US leader in the field. For around $7 per hour, you can pick up a car in your neighborhood knowing that all your gas, parking, and insurance will be paid for. The inclusion of an iPhone App is taking this great idea and propelling it into the 21st century. You now have a mobile connection to a semi-public resource. Smart phones are becoming a type of ’single key access’ to all your living necessities. Instead of a ring of keys, a wallet of credit cards, or a host of user IDs and passwords, you may one day only need to carry around your phone. It’s just another way in which smart phones, and the iPhone in particular, are demonstrating their power as digital tool kits for the 21st century.
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Need to count calories? DailyBurn and iPhone have an App for that.

Need to count calories? DailyBurn and iPhone have an App for that.

Your iPhone can play so many roles in your life: tour guide, military commander, camerman, restaurant reviewer, bank teller, DJ, and now… nutritionist. The newly renamed DailyBurn (formerly Gyminee) has developed a calorie counting iPhone App, called FoodScanner, that lets you scan barcodes on packaged food products to keep track of your daily intake. With over 200,000 registered items in their database, DailyBurn’s App also lets you view nutritional labels post-scan. While the retail price is $3, you can purchase the App now for just $1. Check out the demonstration video after the break.

DailyBurn’s App is just the latest example of how the physical world and the digital information world are merging. Just by pointing the iPhone camera at a scannable object, users can connect themselves to a large database that is directly relevant to their needs. In the case of health and nutrition, this database is DailyBurn’s extensive online community. We’ve seen other such connections like the Layars augmented reality functions on other smart phones. In the future every item in the real world will be enhanced by an extraordinary depth of data we will be able to connect to quickly and easily.
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