5 Siri-like apps for iPhone 4, iPod, and iPad

• By Sebastian Anthony 
• From http://www.extremetech.com/

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One of the biggest puzzlers surrounding the release of iOS 5 is the iPhone 4S’s exclusive ability to use Siri, the voice-controlled virtual assistant. At first we had assumed that Siri requires special hardware — the A5 processor and oodles of RAM, perhaps — but it turns out that the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 are virtually identical. Then there’s the fact that Siri, the standalone app that Apple acquired earlier this year, worked just fine on every iOS device, including the iPhone 3GS and 4, and iPod touch. Still, Apple undoubtedly has its reasons, and who are we to question a higher power?

Fortunately, thanks to a thing called the App Store, there are a few Siri alternatives that you can install. By virtue of being apps, rather baked into the OS like Siri, these alternatives won’t be quite as smooth or fast as Apple’s new wunderkind — but they should be more than capable of sending an email or text while driving, or looking up directions while on the move.

Vlingo (Free)

By far the closest comparison to Siri is Vlingo, an app that has its own voice-recognition engine, a powerful cloud-based back end, and almost all of Siri’s functionality, including booking restaurants. The two caveats are that it can’t set reminders (though a new release might fix that), and unlike its Android brother there doesn’t seem to be a voice-activated mode for hands-free in-car mode.

As an added bonus, there’s also a Vlingo app for just about every platform under the sun, including BlackBerry and Nokia phones, and even Windows; but not Mac, unfortunately.

Google Search (Free)

You probably already have it installed, but the Google Search app for iOS includes the same Voice Search feature found on Android devices. As the name suggests, the app only lets you search using your voice, and there’s absolutely no integration with any other services — but it’s a nice stopgap until Safari innately supports voice searching. Just like mobile website, the Google Search app uses your location data to make sure that the results it returns are contextual, too.

Dragon Go! (Free)

Here’s a fun one: Siri herself doesn’t actually manage voice recognition — a module provided by Nuance does that, and then hands your utterances along to Siri once it’s worked out what you’re trying to say. Dragon Go is made by Nuance, and thus it is just as accurate as Siri… but it’s no where near as polished or full-featured.

Dragon Go is basically a voice interface to a bunch of web services, including Wolfram Alpha, Google, Yelp, Google Maps, and so on. It also interfaces with Pandora, Spotify, and Netflix if they’re installed. There’s also Dragon Diction, which is all about dictating messages or longer notes. You can then send your voice-recognized musing via email, Twitter, Facebook, or SMS.

Built-in Voice Control (Free)

If you want to make (almost) hands-free calls in the car, iOS’s built-in Voice Control is your best bet: press and hold the Home button (or the equivalent on your headset), you’ll hear a beep, and then speak your command. If you want to call someone, say “call” or “dial” followed by their name or number, or you can even initiate a FaceTime connection by saying “FaceTime” and then a name and location (iPhone, home, and so on).

Built-in Voice Control can manipulate your music playback, too (but only the iPod app). Use “play” followed by the name of a song, album, playlist or artist — and you can also “what” and “who” to find out what song/artist is currently playing, or “genius” to have your iDevice pick a new, similar song for you.

Voice Camera Pro ($1.99)

Finally we have the only non-free app on the list: Voice Camera Pro, which does exactly what you think, plus a little bit more. First, you can say “camera” to turn the camera on and “shoot” to take a photo, but you can also say “double,” “triple,” and “quad” to take a series of sequential photos.

You can’t avoid the fact that you have to launch the app before you can use it, though — this isn’t going to let you whip your phone out and magically take photos from the lock screen by shouting “TAKE A PHOTO!” Also, it doesn’t seem to have the ability to shoot video, which seems a little weak for an app that costs money.

iPhone Google Voice App: Download Now at Last

From: http://www.ismashphone.com/

The Beatles on iTunes weren't the only big update of the day for Apple's online music store. The App Store is getting a little something we've all been waiting for called Google Voice.

Some of you may remember the long history that came with getting a Google Voice App on the iPhone. It's not quite as long as getting the Fab Four on the iTunes Store, but the result may be more exciting to some iPhone owners.

We're all huge fans of Google Voice, and have praised it a few times before.

Nice YouTube plug there, Google.

The App has been redesigned, and now combines free SMS texting and the phone functionality within the same application. Which can be a bit nicer than jumping back and forth as you would with the iPhone's applications.

We love the inbox's design.

It combines your Google Voice inbox (which holds your voicemail messages and even transcribes them into text).

The app has four tabs: the aforementioned Inbox, Dialer, Contacts and Settings. Because the dialer combines calling and texting within one menu, its easy to dial out. However, you will only see the phone number you are texting rather than the name of contact.

Push notifications will alert you when you get a message. It all works pretty well so far.

Google Voice can be downloaded for free on the App Store: Here.

Seshroulette: Chatroulette for Pot Smokers

by Brian Ries
from http://www.thedailybeast.com/

Getty Images

Video-chat for Stoners

Parents beware! A new video-chat service bills itself as a safe place for users of medical marijuana to meet online and smoke (legally). Brian Ries gives it a try (legally) and finds out what’s really going on.

"Where da weed attt," my partner asked, staring out at me on webcam from an anonymous bedroom somewhere in the world.

She looked young, 18, maybe, and was drinking from a can of Yoo-hoo. Weedless, I took a sip of wine, hoping she would assume I was “cool,” and began typing.

Amanda, it would turn out, was from Austin, Texas. This was her second night videochatting on Seshroulette.com—a new site for marijuana users to smoke together on camera, randomly.

If the authorities do decide to come knocking, the site doesn’t make it terribly easy for them to follow the smoke.

Amanda’s older brother had introduced her to Seshroulette the night before and they had spent hours getting high with strangers. She had met some “funky people,” some teenagers, and decided it was different than smoking with real-life friends but that “that's what makes it more fun.”

It works like Chatroulette—the original randomized video-chatting service that made waves on the Internet earlier this year—except here users are paired with strangers to have face-to-face smoke sessions.

The site was created three months ago by Dan "Chill," 20, a Web developer and onetime Loyola Marymount University student from Playa Del Rey, California, who legally uses medical marijuana to cure the pain of morning intestinal cramps. He doesn’t get high, he says, just "pleasantly painless.”

The similarities to Chatroulette aren’t unintended. As that site grew in popularity, Dan saw an opportunity to create a place where smokers could meet and smoke in a safe environment—one free of the voyeurs and masturbators that plagued Chatroulette in its early iterations.

According to site rules, all users must be 18 or older and users may smoke only legally issued medicinal marijuana. Also, there are no acts of indecency allowed on Seshroulette, where the rules warn that transgressors “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

“I am yet to see a penis on my site,” Dan told me. “And if I or one of my users does, I encourage them to contact me via the tools on the website to make sure we can get rid of them immediately.”

He used a clone script to “strike while the iron was hot” and launched Seshroulette nearly overnight. It got 1,200 pageviews the first night and has racked up more than 100,000 visitors to date, “which is big for a site with such a small-scale demographic.”

When I first tried it out, there were just three potential partners for me to chat with. A few days later, there were seven. With a recently launched Facebook application and a frequently updated Tumblog that’s listed in Tumblr’s official directory, Dan’s busy.

One of his goals with the site is to prove that you can smoke marijuana and still be a productive, successful person. In fact, he wants to change the connotation of the word "stoner.”

But are the acts on Seshroulette legal?

Dan says he spoke with a prominent criminal-defense lawyer in California to find out, and was told “it was perfectly legal to smoke on camera if you're smoking the marijuana legally in the first place.”

This means it’s OK to smoke and stream from Playa Del Ray, where medicinal marijuana is permitted, but not from Austin, where users can be charged with a Class B misdemeanor, resulting in 180 days in prison and/or a $2,000 fine, for possessing two ounces or less.

Still, even if the authorities do decide to come knocking, the site doesn’t make it terribly easy for them to follow the smoke: The site only tracks users at the city level to see where they are coming from, leaving them otherwise anonymous.

Asked if she was worried about the legality of smoking weed on live video, Amanda, my chatting partner, didn’t see any problem.

"Nah, no one will find out about it and, like, make a big deal out of it,” she said. “I mean I don't think that would happen."

"They say it’s anonymously tracked," I offered.

"Yeah," Amanda said, "and everyone loves weed :)"

The most negative reaction Dan has faced so far has come from HighDEAS.com, another “stoner website,” where users submit ideas and thoughts they had while high. It gets over 170,000 unique visits a month, according to Quantcast, and has secured both a book deal and a reality-show pilot with Comedy Central that’s being executive produced by Michael Davies’ Embassy Row.

One recent poster on the site, an alleged employee of McDonald's, wrote, "I work at McDonalds and its so great when the high people roll through the drive thru because I know I'm making they're day so much better by providing them with mountains of burgers, mcnuggets, and fries. The dollar menu was made for stoners."

Another, pondering the existence of roads, asked, "What the fuck are we gonna do bout all these roads when we get flying cars?"

_breakAd_

When Dan first reached out to HighDEAS creator Nowfal Akash with a proposal to form a partnership, he received an email back with “a blatant NO.”

In it, Akash said that HighDEAS was working on its own video-chatting application and therefore wouldn’t need Seshroulette’s technology.

That same day, HighDEAS moderators began deleting user posts that linked to Seshroulette.

Seeing them disappear, Dan emailed back to “call him out on it.”

“He thought I was spamming,” Dan told me. “But I think that was an excuse.”

Akash told me whether it was Dan or anyone else posting the link-based ads, they qualified as spam under the site’s terms and conditions. Plus, he said, the two sites just weren’t comparable.

“We’re up here and they’re down there,” said Akash. “We’re more of an original idea, that’s just a Chatroulette clone.”

When Dan later created a site that copies HighDEAS’ format to provoke them for deleting the posts, Akash wasn’t amused.

He sent Dan an email threatening legal action if he didn’t back off, and so Dan did.

At the end of the day, Akash says, he feels just fine about Seshroulette, with one condition.

"Just don't troll around my site, it's that simple," he said.

Back on Seshroulette, it’s a little after 4:20 p.m. on a Thursday and I’m surfing from cam to cam. In total, there are 12 users logged on. Each time I refresh, there’s another fresh-faced kid, looking on in anticipation as my camera activates.

There are the two teenage-looking boys playing Xbox, dancing in place, passing around a decent-size joint. I click “Next Sesh.” There’s the twentysomething girl in a cowboy hat, sitting at her desk straightening the camera, smiling. “Next Sesh.” There’s the kid staring out from my screen, his chin resting on his fist, as a tie-dye poster hangs on a closet door in the background. “Next Sesh.”

There’s no way to tell whether these people are actual licensed medical-marijuana users in search of a support network. Probably they’re exactly what they look like: young people, just sitting at home and looking for some funky people to smoke with.

Brian Ries is a Philly-born senior editor at FREEwilliamsburg.com and tech and social media editor at The Daily Beast. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Last Exorcism - BEST OF Chatroulette reactions

Pure Genius!!

Snoop Dogg & George Lopez Play Chatroulette Bingo

That's a crack-a-lackin bingo! [Editor's note: I would seriously watch an entire reality series of this. Is Chatroulette Bingo the new Celebrity Poker???]

New Site Unmasks Chatroulette Players

By JENNA WORTHAM
From http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/

I have a confession to make. I’m addicted to Chatroulette, the buzz-generating Web site created by a Russian teenager that pairs anonymous strangers with each other in a video chat room.

For me, Chatroulette offers a welcome break from the daily digital footprints I leave across the Web on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, where every comment, tweet and “like” is tied back to my real-world identity. Chatroulette is intended to be comfortably anonymous, and it also has the sheen of nostalgia. It’s reminiscent of my earliest encounters with the Internet – firing off messages about schoolwork and television shows in AOL chat rooms and chattering with my World of Warcraft guildmates about their families, jobs and weekend plans.

But now a service called Chatroulette Map, a mash-up of the site with Google Maps, is peeling back some of the anonymity of the users cruising through the site.

Chatroulette Map,which first bubbled up on blogs like Laughing Squid, grabs screenshots of people using the service and, using their IP address and geolocation tools, plots their location on a global map. (Note: Some images may not be work-safe.)

On one hand, Chatroulette Map offers a riveting snapshot of the people who are trying out the service. But on the other, it strips away some of the voyeuristic appeal of being able to peer into a random stranger’s home and life without revealing much information about yourself.

Of course, playing Chatroulette is not without some risk. My colleague Nick Bilton aptly described it as “speed-dating tens of thousands of perfect strangers — some clothed, some not.” The upside to Chatroulette Map is that some of those users might think twice about getting unclothed, making the service more family friendly and less jarring for its users.

On the other hand, the service raises privacy concerns for people using Chatroulette. A recent update on Chatroulette Map reads: ”We’ve decided, at least for the time being, to hide I.P. and host information as some user-identifiable information was found in some entries.”

I’ve reached out to the creators of Chatroulette Map for comment and will update if they respond.

Dancing Dong Shocks People On ChatRoulette - Comedy.com

Comedy.com's friend, the Dancing Dong, surprises people on ChatRoulette and captures their reactions in this video.

New Version of Skype Adds Screen Sharing

Written by Frederic Lardinois

Skype, the popular VOIP client formerly owned by eBay, just released a new beta version of its Windows client. The new version finally brings screen sharing to the Windows client, something which already became available in the last beta version of the Mac client in January. In addition, Skype now also allows users to import their contacts from Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail, AOL, LinkedIn, and Yahoo.

Thanks to this update, Mac users (who use the latest beta version) can now also finally share their screens with PC users, which wasn't possible until now.

Screen Sharing

Overall, while it works perfectly well, Skype's screen sharing features are pretty basic and allow users to either share the full screen or select a part of the screen they want to share. A number of third-party developers already offered Skype plugins that allow users to share their screens with their contacts. And quite a few of these offer a wider range of features than Skype's own solution, including white-board functionality.

The image of the screen is great, as one would expect. But in order to share a screen, a voice call has to be initiated, which might not always be what you really want to do, especially if you are like a lot of us here at RWW who often use Skype for text-only chats as well. Sadly, it also doesn't look like it is possible to share a screen with a group of contacts or a Skype room. For now, you will still need dedicated screen sharing programs like Yuuguu for this kind of functionality.

More New Features

Skype also added additional support for visually impaired users who use screen reading software, as well as birthday reminders that will alert you when it's one of your contacts' birthdays.

As always, we need to point out that this is beta software and you might still find some bugs in it. Overall, though, Skype's beta releases have generally been very stable. A full set of release notes is available here (PDF).