Displaying items by tag: Voice Command

The market for hands-free devices is growing very quickly. This growth has been driven by multiple factors including legal ones. In some states they are required for driving which has been pushing the market forward. Sadly, the market has not really moved forward over the last few years. The devices have gotten smaller, but the feature set and battery life has not changed much. Jabra has been working on changing that over the last year and have come out with some great new hands-free kits including the Jabra Eclipse which is what we are taking a look at today.

Users who have installed Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview version of the operating system on their smartphones noted that Microsoft entered the age restrictions for use of a personal assistant, Cortana. If you login to your Windows Phone smartphone with an account from which it is clear that you are under 13, Microsoft's personal assistant Cortana will be unavailable and a message will appear "I'm sorry, you'll need to be a bit older before I can help you."

Although Samsung has officially mocked the lack of choice that you get with Apple and has made statement and insinuations that Apple is a closed company it sure seems that they are not above the same behavior themselves when it comes to their own phones and services. Lately the internet has been buzzing with talk about their new Galaxy S III phone.

I am sorry Dave; I can’t let you do that… This line from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 a Space Oddesy is what came to mind when I showed off this interesting little trick to a friend of mine. While playing around with Siri on their new iPhone 4S we discovered that even when the phone is locked you can send email, text play music, call someone, use the camera and more than a few other things making just about all security useless on the new phone. This is not the first time that security holes have been found on one of Apple’s devices (like finding that the encryption key is stored in plain text on the phone), but I do think this one is one of the funniest.



With all the furor and excitement over what is not much more than a speech to text engine that can run queries against predefined commands to find out that those commands appear to be able to bypass the lock security. What’s more is that Apple allows this by default. I would think that this would not be something that you would want open on a phone with a passcode; however Apple seems to think they know what is best for their customers. I will say this, at least you can turn this feature off, I just think it should have been off already…

For those of you out there thinking about corporate data and email, I have a feeling that Microsoft will add a new security feature into their corporate phone requirements making it impossible to have this running with the lock requirements. I wonder what that will look like…



Discuss this in our forum