Lets talk about siri, baby. All the good things and the bad things that may be, lets talk about siri and voice control for iPhone users! Siri says… open the Shortcuts app. Now close it. Ooops! Siri didn’t say… Ok but seriously, open the Shortcuts app. There are dozens of…

Are Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Google Home’s, er, Google, and the iPhone’s Siri making people less polite in general, and making children less polite in particular? Given that none of these personal assistants require any manners, some fear that they are.

If you have an iPhone 4S, you are probably already (mostly) loving iPhone 4S Siri. Oh, not in the way that Raj from The Big Bang Theory was loving Siri (a great episode, by the way!) but in that “How did I ever get along without Siri?” kind of way. But you may have found it maddeningly frustrating to try to get Siri to remind you of something by popping up a reminder when you gave arrived at a particular location. Oh sure, it works pretty well if that location is “home” or “work”, but what about when you arrive at other locations? Here’s how to get Siri to remind you upon arriving at a custom location.

We’ve written before about how to set up location-based reminders in the iPhone, however until fairly recently it required you to have the address of the location at which you wanted to be reminded in your contacts. No more. Now you can tell Siri to remind you of something when you arrive anywhere, any time! Here’s how.

As we mentioned in our “what’s new in iOS 9” article, the “improvements” that Apple added to Siri in iOS 9 may be a privacy nightmare (even more than previously).

Amazon just launched its new Echo service, and Echo speaker device (you need both in order to have the Amazon Echo experience). Amazon Echo is best described as “Siri for your home”. In a case of life imitating art, Echo is essentially a virtual assistant (named Alexa), much like Scarlett Johansson’s character in the movie “Her”, always waiting to hear the “wake word” (more on that in a moment).

Did you know that you can change the name that Siri calls you? The name Siri uses for you can be anything you want, whether your nickname, or “Overlord of this Phone,” Siri will use it when she addresses you.

For those of you who are fed up with Siri’s lack of understanding you when ask to do a search, then the Google Voice Search app may be just what you need. When you ask Google Voice Search where the nearest taco shops around you are, unlike Siri, which will likely come back with a list of the nearest tackle shops, the Google Voice Search app will deliver your request with consistent precision.

Apple unveiled the new iPhone 5 and their new connector cable, Lightening. What Apple today called “the biggest things to happen for iPhone since iCloud,” eager Apple fans are calling, “meh.” Apple unveiled the official iPhone 5, which does not appear to be much different from the iPhone 4S. The phone was introduced as being, “designed and built to an exacting level of standard unlike anything we, or anyone in our industry, have made before.” Except the last iPhone, apparently.

If you have the new iPhone 4S, you may find that Siri has her hand in your pocket. According to new research, using Siri can as much as double how much data your iPhone uses, which can be costly indeed. Sure, Siri is fun – but is she worth it?

In the past few days the charge has been levelled that Apple’s voice-command entity, Siri, is anti-abortion. This after it was noted that when people ask Siri for guidance to abortion services, ‘she’ is “unable” to find such services, or in some instances instead directs them to pro-life organizations.