CEO and co-founder of Apple’s Siri, Dag Kittlaus, has launched a demo of his 2012 project with co-founder Adam Cheyer – a new virtual AI platform named Viv. Viv, which stems from the Latin word for life, is similar to Siri in that it is activated by voice and powered by AI and machine-learning. Unlike Siri, however, Viv will …

Not content to have Cortana controlling Windows Mobile, Microsoft has released a toned-down version of its personal assistant tool for iOS and Android handsets. Redmond said that Cortana will run in a diminished capacity on the Apple and Google smartphone OSs, but will still allow users to link up their handsets with Windows …

Review So, um, I love the Amazon Echo. For those of you already frothing at the mouth in righteous indignation, please feel free to scroll to the bottom right away, click "Post a comment" and vent about privacy, Jeff Bezos' secret police, and whatever else is bothering. Meanwhile, for the rest of you, let's get straight to it: the …

A group of researchers from the French government's Network and Information Security Agency (ANSSI) have found a way to silently and wirelessly inject voice commands into unlocked iPhones and Android gadgets. The technique, detailed in a paper published by the IEEE, requires the devices to have a wired headphones plugged in – …

DIY repair biz iFixit says it can no longer offer its iOS mobile app, thanks to a ban from Apple. iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens wrote in a blog post that Apple had pulled his company's developer account due to a terms and conditions violation and, as a result, the iFixit iOS app had also been taken down from the App Store. According …

Vid Apple has tried to make a revamped Siri the star of its next version of iOS, even going so far as to name this week's monster product unveiling after its digital assistant. But it seems Siri has her eyes on an even bigger stage than either the iPhone or Apple TV: the White House. During a Thursday press briefing by Obama …

Humanity reached a new low point last Monday, 24 August: on that day a billion of your fellow homo sapiens logged on to Facebook, which subsequently decided humans can't be trusted to do their own shopping. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the free content ad network announced the landmark on Facebook, of course. Zuck wrote: “This …

Pics Apple has sent out invites for a press conference next week where it will unveil new iPhones – quite possibly the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. The Cupertino giant has issued passes to its docile and compliant friends in the media for a mystery event on September 9 in San Francisco. El Reg's invite was lost in the post, …

Siri will soon answer your phone calls, adding a functionality that Orange killed in 2005 when it shut down the still-lamented Wildfire service. It’s rumoured that Apple employees are testing a system which can transcribe voicemails. Believed to be called iCloud Voicemail, the service seems to be a mix of Wildfire and that …

First look The Register has slipped the first iOS 9 public beta onto an Apple 'slab to have a bit of a go with the software. It's a solid, if not monumental, update for Apple's mobile operating system. There's nothing too earth-shattering for most users, but since it's going to be a free update for anyone running iOS 8, you're going to …

QuoTW This week saw Microsoft sharpen the knives while GM showed off an incredibly ugly car and Samsung borked a few notebooks. Here are the best quips we picked up along the way. Outsourcing house of horrors Capita recently made 700 UK workers redundant. Turns out, they might be the lucky ones, if our story is any indication. The …

Amazon is reaching out to developers in an effort to build a rival to voice assistant services like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. The online retail giant has released APIs and a software development kit (SDK) in an effort to build up its new Alexa voice service, which is built into its Echo smart speaker. It has also …

The Illuminati have revealed themselves once again, this time through their "intelligent personal assistant" Siri, which immediately reports device owners to the police when they ask about 9/11. CBCnews reports that 114 budding truthers were redirected to the police over a two hour period on Sunday morning. Police believe the …

Apple has published a temporary workaround for iPhones blighted by incoming text messages that cause them to crash and restart – and it involves asking Siri for help. A specially crafted sequence of unicode triggers a fatal bug in a core component of iOS and OS X. If the data is sent in a text message, it will crash an iThing …

Apple’s digital assistant Siri is running on Apache Mesos, the cluster-manager billed by its creator as a data centre operating system. This means the open-source project, which began life in 2009, is now powering voice queries on iPhone and iPad. Cupertino is believed to be running one the industry’s largest Mesos clusters, …

When Samsung shoved the Galaxy S5 out the door last year, one of the things it put front and centre was the new ability to log on with one's fingerprint. Fast forward twelve months and Sammy looks to be giving that idea a finger of a different sort, by signing a deal with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to put iris- …

A group of computer scientists from Italy and Poland reckon they can use steganography to hide covert messages in users' voice commands to Siri. What's interesting about the work, described in this paper at Arxiv, is that it doesn't involve installing new software on the target device. Rather, iStegSiri would exist as a man-in …

Using your phone's cyber-slave by voice while focusing on the road? You're not as safe as you think, according to AAA. The US auto club said it found apps such as Siri, and in-car personal assistant systems, are far more distracting than expected. A study [PDF] AAA carried out with the University of Utah found that using …