Apple's Siri voice assistant offers the meaning of life

This Oct. 19, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer, where I blog about mobile, tablet and other emerging tech. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

One of your most basic reporting tools just got a whole lot more powerful with the help of your mobile phone: your voice.

Voice tools on mobile phones are exploding and offering new ways to communicate, multitask, interact and organize your life and work. Whether you’re running between assignments and need to send quick email or text message to your boss, get an address for your source’s location, checking the weather to know if you need rain gear for your lenses, Tweet news tidbits or one of the many other actions, your voice’s power just got amplified.

The new iPhone 4s offers a tool called Siri has a great number of commands it responds to. Unfortunately, the Siri program is only available on the iPhone 4s. Someone has hacked it to work on an iPhone 4 but it requires jailbreaking and might get shut down by Apple.

Google’s Android mobile operating system has been the pioneer in the voice conversion arena from their launch of Google Voice automatically translating voicemail-to-text to their Android keyboards which always include voice-to-text buttons. Available on all Android phones, Google also offers a handful of voice actions available natively within the phone.

There’s also a handful of third-party apps available to get more robust “Siri-like” personal assistant options (Vlingo is my personal favorite on Android, although I use the stock Google voice commands most frequently.)

Somewhat related and very interesting and useful for those of us that cover multi-cultural beats — there’s a new version of Google Translate with an enriched “conversation” mode (currently in Alpha, so it’s not perfect) and additional language support. The app can both listen and speak for you, translating the message on both sides. It’s breathtakingly amazing. So if you’re out on assignment and find yourself trying to communicate with someone who’s not a native English speaker, you can use this tool to help communicate in more than 50 languages from Afrikaans to Yiddish.

Hey gang. Just a heads up, things are going to remain quiet around here for a while. I have a bunch of travel coming up through October and the big Society for News Design conference on Sept. 29-Oct. 1, which I’m co-directing. So I apologize for the quiet time.

If you join us in St. Louis though, I think you’ll find it was worth it and if you register for SND STL before August 31, you can save $100. Come kick it with me and amazing folks like Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan in a very rare, public appearance together, where they’ll be releasing a new project, exclusively announced at SND STL.

It’s going to be an amazing shindig with the most mobile and tablet training out of any journalism conference in the country this year. We’ll soon have more than 80 speakers representing organizations with diverse audiences from The Onion to ESPN, sizes from The Joplin Globe to The New York Times, and varied content topics from “Milk Eggs Vokda” to Readers Digest, in more than 40 sessions.

The entire conference and speakers will focus on presenting inspiring and/or practical tools and training with all sorts of fun stuff planned to make this the best conference, ever in the history of the earth: print and digital design, 10-story-slides, data visualization, comics journalism, interactive mapping, gooey butter cake, career advice, social media, pub crawls, news app development, bootstrapping media projects and much more planned — all of this for an amazing price, especially when you compare the total cost to other journalism conferences (and their hotels rates that for two days cost more than an iPad).

Learn more and please help spread the word: sndstl.com

So as the school year has come to an end I’ve had several requests form graduating seniors for advice on what gear they should purchase to add to their arsenal  to get them ready for the next step of their career. A long time ago I set up a gear guide to help people with this, but it’d been a while since I’d updated it, until this weekend. So take a gander if you’re curious, looking for some interesting summer reading or in the market for new multimedia, mobile gear or books, check it out.

I also added a couple more categories to better split out the topics into more clear buckets: Design, development, mobile/tablet tools, management & leadership, social media & community, video/audio/photo gear and video/audio/photo training. … Oh, and “Nerdtastic stuff”… my favorite category of quirky nerd tools and gifts.

Full Disclosure: That is an affiliate link, so if you make a purchase I’ll get a 4% kick back, which I’ll use towards hosting costs for the site. It doesn’t cost you any more, just sends a little cash my way for helping create the resource.

Flickr photo courtesy Stéfan Le Dû

The Carnival of Journalism results are in and I’m furious with myself that I just thought of ‘hacks for hacks’ as a semi-clever title for the project. … Anyway, last month we asked for your suggestions on the best life/workflow/info/journalism hacks to help us all get faster, better, smarter and working harder. Thanks to everyone who contributed. There’s so many awesome tips, tools and techniques here, please check them out and then get to back to rocking out productively!

• Paul Bradshaw breaks down his hacks into the techniques of: Shortcuts, Automation, Habits, Discipline.
• Aram Zucker-Scharff shares many different ideas including, how Kindle 3G rocks, the WordPress “After the Deadline” plugin, the powers of Boolean logic, plus bonus time management tools
• Jonathan Groves offers iPhone hacks for using your iPhone as a jack-of-all-trades media device
• André Natta focuses on technique tips to maximize your productivity
• Mary Hamilton offers a wealth of valuable time-saving technique tips
• Emma Carew offers tips from never getting lost in the parking garage to a keyboard shortcut to resurrect tabs you accidentally close
• Steve Outing offers tips from banking to maintaining “Inbox Zero” on your email
• Kathy Gill offers a plethora of Twitter tools, as well as iPad and desktop apps
• Fellow RJI Fellow David ‘Zog’ Herzog has some awesome apps for those of us PC folks out there, especially interested in data and programming for journalism
• Dr. Jack Rosenberry offers insight on using Google Docs for teaching journalistic writing
• Sheree Martin shows the importance a healthy ‘life’ in those ‘lifehacks’ with her insightful post
• Jackie Borchardt also recommends exercise, along with a gaggle of other tools
• Carrie Brown-Smith discusses how she hacks and controls her social media time and more tricks of the trade
• David Cohn gives away his brilliant Viddler technique for the flood of interview requests he gets, and many more tips
• Rick Martin goes above and beyond offering a video tutorial on how to use Markdown in Textmate
• Denise Cheng offers tools to work with devs, filtering feeds and a bonus tool to find your phone
• Benét J. Wilson, who I just met this weekend, offers her top five tools including two must-read books
• Joy Mayer shows off her combo of Delicious and Remember The Milk to rock out using tags for her classes
• Steve Fox tells us to, “Get up out of your seat and go talk to people!“
• Josh Braun offers tips to tools that are especially handy to writers
• Megan Taylor breaks down her tips in a succinct link guide
• ….and finally, 5 more tips from me (in addition to the original dozen or so in the call to action for the carnival)

For the Carnival of Journalism this month, we’re looking for productivity tools and info/work hacks. Besides the 18 or so tips I offered to kick start the conversation, here’s 5 more that have been especially helpful for me this year managing all the projects I’ve been working on (ONA Board, SND St. Louis, Multimedia Immersion, speaking and consulting gigs, etc.):

1- Android
I’m sorry all you iPhone folks, I’m not trying to start a civil war here, I’ve used both the iPhone as a personal phone and it’s good, but Google’s Android integration with all Google’s products has saved massive time and frustration this year, especially with all the travel I’ve been doing. Specifically:

• Google Calendar (be careful with time zones though, change them manually to be sure)
• Google Voice (Saved me massive amounts of cell phone minutes because I can use Voice seamlessly as my phone’s native calling service — no app opening, my phone can just default to always use Google Voice. Also loved being able to direct my calls to where I was, auto voicemail transcriptions and mp3′s of voicemails are awesome)
• Gmail (one email archive, easily integrates with other services)
• Google Docs (especially with the awesome new Android app, great to use a personal Dropbox with their ultra cheap storage space – $5 fo 20 GB!)
• Gtasks (Google Tasks third party app, that allows me to sync my desktop tasks with mobile tasks, I use it for my to do lists.)
• Free Android tethering also rocks (while it’s more up to your carrier this has saved me many times avoiding $13.99 a day hotel wifi charges.. or even free “wireless broadband” at hotels that isn’t broadband at all… not even DSL speeds.)

2- Boomerang for Gmail

Taming and managing email has been a critical skill I’ve tried to master over the past year and this tool has been a godsend. This tool for Gmail is fantastic for sending email reminders to yourself (especially if people haven’t responded to previous messages — critical in project management) as well as sending scheduled email messages. They’ve also created an interesting game to learn and practice better workflow (who would have thought email could be a game?). Fyi, Don’t worry about the Boomerang website (the design is a little weird, especially the font on the customer testimonials, which made me nervous initially) but I’ve been using it and this tool is the real deal. If all of Android’s brilliance has made me admire Google, the fact that they haven’t bought up this company and integrated it into Gmail makes me question if they really are in it to win it.

2- Gmail prioritization management and filters
There’s no quick and easy tip for this, but I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing my email to do pre-sorting before I see it. It can be dangerous though if you have a filter being a little bit too aggressive and deleting things automatically. So I’ve started to clean this up and move them to a “possible junk mail folder” that I go through occasionally.

4- Google Reader plugin from PostRank
This helps you dive through your RSS feeds quickly and see what the most popular posts are. You must keep in mind, that this is popularity, not interestingness to yourself though.

5- My 6 Sense
Awesome tool that learns your interests and customizes feeds for your preferences and it only gets better with time!