Spoken notifications can come in handy when using your iOS device while working out at the gym, riding a bicycle or attached to your car’s hands-free audio system via Bluetooth.  No need to actually look at the screen and read the message you just received. All you need to do is listen. Here is how to set it up.

Enable the VoiceOver Accessibility setting

The iOS setting that you need to enable is actually an accessibility feature called VoiceOver.  This feature can be used to read all aspects of the screen using Siri’s voice, including notifications that pop up on the screen.  The following steps will also allow you to easily turn on and off the VoiceOver setting, as it may not be a feature that you want enabled all of the time.

• Open the Settings App and navigate to the Accessibility setting located within the General settings.
• Select the VoiceOver settings located at the top of the list, but do not turn it on just yet. Instead scroll down to the bottom of the VoiceOver settings and turn on Speak Notifications.
• Navigate back to the list of all Accessibility settings and scroll down to the bottom of the list.
• Set the Triple-click Home Button setting to turn on VoiceOver and exit out of the Settings app.

That’s it.  Now every time the Home button is triple-clicked, the device will enter into VoiceOver mode.  Once in VoiceOver mode, Siri’s voice will read aloud all of the information on the screen, including notifications. To turn off VoiceOver, simply triple-click the Home button again.

Works with any Notifications-capable app

This VoiceOver feature as configured above will work with any app that takes advantage of iOS’s notification system.  Just be sure to configure the notification setting so that the app you are interested in can display an alert on the lock screen.  Using VoiceOver this way will respect your Do Not Disturb settings.

One app in particular that is useful to use in association with this feature is Twitter.  I have enabled certain news accounts that I follow on Twitter to be able to send me notifications.  With VoiceOver feature enabled, Siri will speak over the music that I am listening to and read the tweet to me.  It’s like adding your own custom news service to your favorite music stream, which I have found to be a very useful feature.

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Reports 9to5Mac:

According to people familiar with the plans, Apple is working with car makers on updated versions of car center consoles that could attach to iOS devices like the iPhone. Specifically, an iPhone could be plugged into a car and an optimized, redesigned version of Apple Maps will appear on the car’s built-in display instead of a proprietary GPS system found in many cars.

The Maps app on the dashboard — mirrored from the phone’s display — would then be controlled via voice with Siri, according to the report.

That Apple has bigger plans for the car beyond a hands-free assistant app is not surprising. The car will be an integral part of consumers’ connected, digital lives and Apple can’t sit that one out.

But the report is vague about how far along the company is with these plans. It mentions that the capability is based on iOS 7 — which is expected to be introduced at WWDC in June — but that “a public release could be potentially be far off.”

Considering how slow it’s been going for the Eyes Free feature, it could be a while for even fuller integration. It was at WWDC 2012, last June, that Apple announced that Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Honda, General Motors, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes and Toyota were on board for Siri Eyes Free. To date, only General Motors has implemented the feature (two Chevy models) while Honda and Mercedes have announced plans.

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The Wikidata project was kicked off around a year ago by the German chapter of Wikimedia, which is still steering its gradual development. For Wikipedia, the advantage is simple and powerful — if there’s a central, machine-readable source for facts, such as the population of a city, then any update to that data can be instantly reflected across all the articles in which the facts are included.

To posit a morbid example: a singer may have dozens or even hundreds of language versions of her Wikipedia entry and, if she were to die, the addition of a date of death to the Wikidata database would immediately propagate across all those versions, with no need to manually update each one (yes, I can also see how this might go horribly wrong).

Indeed, Wikidata is now being used as a common data source for all 286 Wikipedia language versions. Here’s the under-development “item” page for Russia, if you want to see what Wikidata looks like in practise.

But the really interesting thing with Wikidata is that it’s not just for Wikipedia – although it’s worth remembering that its API is still under development, the database can be used by anyone as it is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Here’s how Wikidata project director Denny Vrandečić put it in a statement:

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it, whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”

There are already some pretty cool (if bare-bones) examples of what people can do with Wikidata. One is GeniaWiki, which is trying to map the family relationships between famous people (the first and so far only example is that of the Bach family), while a Tree of Life project is trying to put together a viable, Wikidata-based “taxonomy of all life”.

It’s worth noting that the initial funding for Wikidata’s development has come from Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Ultimately, Wikidata is precisely the sort of venture that is needed to feed the nascent semantic web and AI movement.

It’s far from the only venture in this space – I’d also recommend keeping a close eye on Google’s Knowledge Graph, which powers Google Now, and Wolfram|Alpha, which partly powers Siri – but all these (often intertwined) projects are essentially trying to do the same thing: to turn facts into something that machines can understand.

And that, in conjunction with advances in natural language processing and machine learning, will ultimately help us converse with machines. These are the building blocks of artificial intelligence and the future of search, and Wikidata’s very permissive license should act as an open invitation to anyone dabbling in this space.

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Here’s Wired‘s explanation on what happens when you ask Siri to do something for you and the information goes off to an Apple data center:

Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned.

Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes.

The report includes a statement from Apple, which confirms the anonymized information may be kept “for up to two years.” But, according to the Apple spokeswoman, “If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data.”

The two-year mark is six months longer than Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, all of which retain search data for 18 months.

Apple clarified what it does with this information because a lawyer for the ACLU started asking questions. The concern stemmed from Apple’s privacy policy for Siri users, which states in part, “Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time to generally improve Siri and other Apple products and services.”

Machine learning technology and natural language processing, which is what Siri is based on, needs a lot of information to identify patterns in data and therefore be more helpful both in understanding your speech and providing correct answers.

Being connected to an anonymized set of digits may make some users uncomfortable, so the ACLU thinks Apple should make that more clear before they start using the service.

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With Trapit’s existing web and iPad apps, users search for a subject or URL and save it as a “trap.” Trapit then uses artificial intelligence to surface relevant web content from a pool of around 140,000 sources. Users can improve their recommendations by tapping a thumbs-up or thumbs-down and selecting the reason they don’t like a piece of content. There are now over 10 million people “inside the service,” Trapit cofounder Hank Nothhaft told me, though the company wouldn’t disclose the number of registered users.

Trapit’s new Publisher Suite lets publishers deliver content from their own publications and from across the web. They can also add their own sources to Trapit’s pool and can push out all of their content to readers in a somewhat Google Reader-like fashion. They get access to analytics and can see how users are engaging with content. And publishers control the advertising within their app. Pricing starts at $1,000 a month.

Why Here Media chose Trapit: Control over ads and sources

Some of Trapit’s new publisher offerings sound similar to the new publisher services offered by Flipboard. The new features, rolled out at the end of March, let users create custom magazines using content pulled in from anywhere. From the beginning, Trapit has differentiated itself from Flipboard by emphasizing both the fact that it digs up content readers wouldn’t find on their own and that it doesn’t scrape content from publishers’ sites. (Trapit serves web pages within its app but shows their original design, videos, comments and ads.)

Paul Colichman, CEO of Here Media, told me that’s what attracted him to Trapit. Most discovery apps “literally lift the content from publishers and don’t compensate them at all,” he said. “When an app takes all of your content and delivers the whole story without any need to link and [without] showing any of your ads, it is not helpful for publishers.” Trapit, he said, is “more fair and appropriate for the publisher” because Trapit users see the same ads that they’d see on a publisher’s site.

Here Media customized its white-label Trapit iPad app, “Advocate Discovery,” for its users. “With all of these [discovery] platforms, the gay and lesbian community are often terribly underrepresented,” Colichman said. Trapit’s sources “didn’t pull from the hundreds or thousands of sources that are LGBT-specific.” So Here Media added about 1,500 custom sources to its app, and plans to add around 2,500 more in the next 60 days. “In my opinion,” Colichman said, “Advocate Discovery will be the only gay app any gay person ever needs.”

Trapit’s Nothhaft said that the company is in discussions with other publishers and expects to announce new partners soon. Non-publishers are signing on, too; consulting firm Deloitte used Trapit’s tools to create an internally available app that surfaces knowledge and information about the industries Deloitte covers.

Trapit is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and is backed by Horizons Ventures and SRI International.

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Shanghai Zhi Zhen makes a product called Xiaoi, which the company calls a “chat robot system” used for customer service and hotlines. While Apple owns a patent on Siri, its voice-activated personal assistant app, the Chinese company claims its patent was applied for in 2004 and was granted in 2006. Siri appeared first on the iPhone in fall 2011.

Siri was developed with a technology Apple acquired when it purchased the company behind it in 2010. The speech recognition engine is believed to have been built using technology licensed from Nuance Communications.

Shanghai Zhi Zhen’s problem with Siri is the robot interaction aspect of Siri, not speech recognition, according to what its spokeswoman told Shanghai Daily:

“The core technology of Siri is man-machine interaction rather than speech recognition, and that is based on the word chat robot system Xiaoi patented,” Mei [Li] said.

Though the original suit was filed last year, the first hearing is set to take place Wednesday.

Last year Apple was forced to pay $60 million to a local company after a Chinese court ruled against Apple in a trademark dispute over the iPad. The company that won the damages award was bankrupt and looking for cash. But this company, Shanghai Zhi Zhen, has not asked for any damages yet. But it is asking for its patents to be enforced.

Apple, for its part, has reportedly asked the country’s intellectual property agency to invalidate Shangai Zhi Zhen’s patent.

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Siri

Expectation: This is an iOS 6 issue, but I expected to use Siri on a near-daily basis.

Reality: I use Siri on a near-daily basis. With iOS 6 she got better, and I frequently have a desire to send and receive texts while operating a motor vehicle. Looking at the phone and typing while doing this, I’ve heard, is frowned upon. So I use Siri instead. For the most part, she does a decent job. I’ve learned the hard way to keep my messages short. I don’t really use Siri to create Reminders, move calendar events, and the like. I do, however, use her to check on when the Red Sox are playing and what the score is.

What I’d like to see improved: I don’t like her all-or-nothing option to change a text message. I’d love to be able to tell her to replace a word. Often, in a multi-sentence text she’ll get it correct, except for that one word that’s crucial to understanding the meaning of the message.

The camera

Expectation: I expected that the iPhone 5 would continue to replace my point-and-shoot camera.

Reality: Even with the purple haze problem, the iPhone 5 has indeed solved my needs for a point-and-shoot camera.

What I’d like to see improved: Maybe a little better image focus and stabilization. If I’m shooting a picture of a handheld object and my hands are slightly shaking, I’ve noticed the iPhone auto-focus is tad sensitive. I imagine the camera on the iPhone 5S (or whatever the next-generation iPhone is called) will be better in ways I won’t be able to detect, but I think the iPhone 5 camera is good as is.

The screen

Expectation: It would be really different than the iPhone 4S screen.

Reality: Well, it’s certainly taller.  The extra row of icons is helpful. With the previous screen size, I always had apps I use frequently sitting on the second screen. Now, all the apps I use often are one screen. Apps like Twitter, Facebook, Notes, and Evernote feel more comfortable with the taller screen. The Kindle and iBooks apps feel like I’m reading from a weird legal size paper. Other apps seem to think the extra real estate is perfect for showing me more ads — I’m looking at you, The Weather Channel.

I was hoping I would use Pages more, but it still doesn’t seem to adapt well to the large screen. In fairness, this complaint may be me moving the goal posts since even on my Nexus 7 I’m not doing any writing. Nor do I feel my life is really missing an iPad mini, either.

What I’d like to see improved: I agree with Andy Ihnatko’s take on the Samsung Galaxy S3 screen. I frequently keep my iPhone in a car mount where it sits right in that hard-to-see range for my old guy eyes. I want to see Apple release a larger screen. There are few things that tempt me towards Android phones, and the screen size is always the demon on my shoulder.

My workflow

Expectation: The iPhone would continue to be command central for my life.

Reality: It still remained command central, but my iPad usage for non-leisure activities increased. This isn’t an indictment against the iPhone per se, and it likely has more to do with buying an iPad with cellular connectivity this time around, along with a keyboard case. However, the majority of my communications, note-taking and task management functions have been on the iPhone 5. What was previously an 80-20 split is now about a 70-30 split. For long-form writing away from my Mac, the iPad will likely always win that battle.

What I’d like to see improved: A system-side sharing feature like there is in Android. I absolutely love that I can send links to Instapaper and Evernote in Android with one easy click, as long as the app is installed. No messy bookmarks to install.

Final thoughts

My only regret with the iPhone 5 is self-created: Instead of opting for a 64 GB phone, I bought the 32 GB and AppleCare+. I should have bought the 64 GB as I’m now struggling to find room for my music. I’m swapping out albums more than I’d like. I bought AppleCare+ because I expected for financial reasons that I’d skip the 2013 iPhone update and wanted the extra coverage — I was too far off my upgrade cycle for any discounts last year, so I’m going to wait until I don’t need to pay the off-contract price.

I’m impressed with the overall sturdiness of the iPhone 5. I don’t keep it in a case, and with the metal back I don’t feel like it’s going to shatter with a bad fall. I don’t seem to have as many weird cell reception issues as I had before. I work in a section of a building with notoriously bad cell coverage (about 1 bar), but outside of that, I don’t seem to have many “you’re holding it wrong” issues. The LTE speeds are nice, I just wish AT&T’s coverage net was wider. I get LTE at work, but not near home.

Overall, I’d say the iPhone 5 met my expectations. While I’d likely buy an iPhone with a larger screen, I do like that the iPhone 5 is the same width as previous iPhones; it’s not too bulky in my pockets.

Next time, though, I’m getting the largest storage option available. I guess size does matter after all.

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But this is likely just what the earliest iteration of such a device could do. Apple may start small, but it tends to think pretty big: after all, it launched the iPhone without third-party apps while internally debating whether or not Apple should offer developers access to the phone — and that worked out pretty well. It’s not a stretch to assume Apple would want to offer access to its most important basic services — from FaceTime and iMessage to Notes, Reminders and notifications — to any wearable device, like it has to the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

And it’s at this point that iWatch could really stretch what Apple is capable of delivering as far as internet services. Few doubt that Apple will make a really beautiful piece of hardware. But a future version of an iWatch could, like MobileMe did in 2008 and like Apple Maps did last fall, further reinforce the notion that Apple is still very weak when it comes to implementing web-based services.

However, the promise of an iWatch connected to the cloud could finally push Apple to get its web-based act together.

The promise of Siri

The dream of an iWatch is to (eventually) do many of the things we rely on our mobile devices for, but on a small computer resting on our wrists: browse the web, get mapping directions, send text messages, and in the case of the iPhone, use alternate interaction and communication methods, like a video call on FaceTime or voice-controlled Siri to get tasks done.

Siri, in particular, seems especially ideal for a device that will likely have pretty small display and no hardware buttons. Initially this may be unnecessary if you’re simply using the watch for checking your heart rate or tapping to answer a call. But when an iWatch becomes more capable, voice control might be the quickest way to add something to your calendar or even send a text message. Siri’s going to have to get a lot better for that to be a selling point for an iWatch someday, of course.

In my personal experience, Siri is one of those “nice to have” features but it doesn’t play into my use of my iPhone or iPad on any kind of regular basis. This is mostly because it’s just slow. I love the idea of dictating a text message when I’m driving; the reality is that by the time Siri understands what I actually want it to do, sometimes it takes much longer than it should. This is somewhat understandable because the service is still technically in beta. (But that brings up a whole other point of why a service Apple has been actively advertising as a key iOS feature is still in beta nearly 17 months later.)

iWatch and the cloud

And then there’s the general reliability of Apple’s cloud-based services. iCloud, which is Apple’s solution for keeping users’ content accessible from different Apple devices, is no stranger to outages; there was a half-day episode just last week that took down iCloud backup, Photo Stream and Documents in the cloud for some users.

But its other internet-based services that also operate in the cloud (i.e. not iCloud) aren’t always reliable either. Siri, iMessage, FaceTime, Maps and GameCenter are all services that have gone offline at one point or another or experienced major usage issues. An iWatch could add millions of more access points for these services at the same time that Apple will presumably be growing its user base through the sale of iPhones, iPads and other devices too.

Even if the iWatch does arrive before Christmas 2013, as some outlets have reported, it doesn’t appear like there will be many of Apple’s cloud-based services included right away. So Apple has some time to get there.

But an iWatch — if and when it arrives, and if and when it is integrated with Apple’s cloud services — could either help Apple’s internet services teams shine or further tarnish their reputation. Google Glass may be dorky, but no one worries about whether or not Google will be able to deliver useful and compelling web services to its wearable computer.

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Honda called Siri Eyes Free an “in-vehicle tool that will help meet the connectivity and convenience needs of its customers in a responsible manner” in a press release. Siri’s Eyes Free mode is available to drivers who own an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5 running iOS 6. It’s meant to let drivers interact with their iPhone while keeping their focus on the road. With Eyes Free drivers can make hands-free calls, send texts, listen to messages, make and find calendar appointments and select songs to play. Honda will integrate its Bluetooth HandsFree Link in-car software with Siri.

Apple first announced its intention to move its voice assistant software to connected cars in June 2012. Other brands said to be working on in-car Siri integration include Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes and Toyota. Ford is a notable exception that will not be participating.

General Motors was the first to announce Siri-compatible cars last November: the 2013 Chevy Spark and 2013 Chevy Sonic, both of which are due to arrive this year.

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Maluuba users can enter in all kinds of shopping-related requests and Maluuba will find a list of products it thinks matches your criteria. These can be both local and online products. Maluuba produces results from Google and has integrated into the data feeds of Best Buy and Walmart, allowing people to also see products from those retailers. It also provides local results for stores nearby.

For example, you can say: “Find me a humidifier under $50,” and Maluuba will bring back a list of a products that match. When I performed that search, Maluuba first took me to results from Google but I could check out tabs for Walmart and Best Buy. You can also ask for a specific brand or describe the product you’re looking for. When you’re ready to buy, you just click once and you go through an external check-out process.

The actual buying is still a little balky on a smartphone because you have to enter in payment and shipping data on a small screen. That’s why you see more smartphones in use for shopping research as opposed to actual buying, which happens more on PCs and tablets. But since starting a shopping query is pretty fast and intuitive with Maluuba, this might help spur on more smartphone-based commerce especially since the product isn’t limited to online shopping. Maluuba can also point you to retailers nearby that stock a product. That feature is based on Yelp data but it’s not always accurate.

Maluuba also provides a look into more than 100 etailer websites, including Amazon, eBay and others, so asking about a product from that retailer prompts Maluuba to send you into their website. For example, I was looking for sweaters at Zara and Maluuba took me right into the search results page for sweaters on Zara.com.

Maluuba, which has $2 million in funding from Samsung Ventures, is looking to integrate with thousands of commerce site and it also wants to incorporate social signals, said Tareq Ismail, Maluuba’s user experience designer. So in the future, Maluuba can customize searches and results based on a person’s interests and likes.

I think Maluuba needs more deep ecommerce integrations to be really useful, though it’s off to a good start. And it would be great if Maluuba could speed up the actual checkout process. I’d also like a simple way to continue reading my Maluuba results from another device so I can complete my purchases later. But I think it’s nice to have a way to craft shopping queries using natural language, especially when you’re on the go. And it might just get me to start more shopping quests from my phone.

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