Skip to main content

Using Speech with iOS and Android: SiriKit, Voice Capabilities, Google Assistant

SiriKit
SiriKit enables your iOS apps and watchOS apps to work with Siri, so users can get things done using just their voice. Your content and services can be used in new scenarios including access from the lock screen and hands-free use.

Apps adopt SiriKit by building an extension that communicates with Siri, even when your app isn’t running. The extension registers with specific domains and intents that it can handle. For example, a messaging app would likely register to support the Messages domain, and the intent to send a message. Siri handles all of the user interaction, including the voice and natural language recognition, and works with your extension to get information and handle user requests.

Apple Developer


Adding Voice Capabilites

Voice actions are an important part of the wearable experience. They let users carry out actions hands-free and quickly. Wear provides two types of voice actions:

System-provided
These voice actions are task-based and are built into the Wear platform. You filter for them in the activity that you want to start when the voice action is spoken. Examples include "Take a note" or "Set an alarm".

 App-provided
These voice actions are app-based, and you declare them just like a launcher icon. Users say "Start " to use these voice actions and an activity that you specify starts.

Android Developer


Get Started with System Voice Action

  1. Define an intent filter
  2. Handle the intent in your app
  3. Update your app completion status


Overview of the Voice Interaction API

Whether your app uses system or custom voice actions, there might be times when the app would like to ask the user a follow-up question before performing the action. For example when a user launches a music app by saying “play some music”, the app may want to ask the user “what genre?” Or when a home automation app hears the user say “OK Google, turn on the lights”, it might want to ask “which room?” The Voice Interaction API lets apps ask follow-up questions like these.




The Google Assistant and Media Apps

 The Google Assistant lets you use voice commands to control many devices, like Google Home, your phone, and more. It has a built-in capability to understand media commands ("play something by Beyonce") and supports media controls (like pause, skip, fast forward, thumbs up).

Android Developer



Comments

Post a Comment

Most Favorite Posts

Pieceable Viewer

Show your iOS apps on the web inside an interactive flash movie. Pieceable Viewer works with most iPhone applications. If you have a native binary that runs on the iOS Simulator, it should run in Pieceable Viewer. UIKit based applications work best. OpenGL and MapView based content runs but isn't rendered - these will be better supported in a later version. iPad applications will be supported in a later version. Pieceable
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple Reachability + Blocks

I like this block-based approach much more as opposed to listening for notifications or having a delegate callback on a central Reachability instance. In most uses-cases I have seen so far you are probably just calling a method on the watching view controller and there it helps that the observer block can capture some state. Because of this we don’t need to use the C-level state passing. At the time of this writing the code for DTReachability is now present on the develop branch of DTFoundation, it will be merged into master for the next release. Since it has a dependency on the SystemConfiguration.framework I put it into its own static lib and Cocoapods sub spec to use individually. I am using this in AutoIngest for Mac now, but it should work without modification on iOS just the same. Your feedback is welcome. Cocoanetics
Post a Comment
Read more

Server-driven UI (SDUI): Meet Zalandos AppCraft and AirBnB Lona

A short WTF: Joe Birch:  SERVER DRIVEN UI, PART 1: THE CONCEPT Zalando seems to follow the SDUI principle as well - defining a common design language and construct the screens on the backend while displaying them natively on the clients. They even go one step further; they implemented a mighty toolset to enable non-technical stakeholders to define their own native app screens Compass: Web tooling to create screens and bind data Beetroot: Backend service that combines the screen layout definition with the data Lapis/Golem: iOS/Android UI render engines Crazy cool! Good job, guys (when you do an open-source release?) To even move faster a Flutter based UI render engine implementation was great! See also AirBnB Lona SDUI approach Building a Visual Language Why Dropbox sunsetted its universal C++ mobile project and AirBnB its React Native implementation
2 comments
Read more

FF Chartwell: Defining pie chart, bar charts and many others via vector font!

  With FF Chartwell you can define Charts via OpenType font, and transform a string, e.g. " 60+ 30 + 10 " into a Pie Chart 60%-30%-10% including color support (not only b/w!) without rendering anything: directly via font without using any images! Check this out: FontBlog FF Chartwell So great!
Post a Comment
Read more

10 Coolest Keyboard Shortcuts You Never Knew About

Keyboard shortcuts are the lifeblood of many productive Mac users. Not only can keyboard shortcuts make for a nicer user experience and cut down on the time needed to do a task, they can also just be plain cool. Mac OS X has many shortcuts ready and willing to do your bidding, but also has many hidden and unknown shortcuts. That's why we've compiled a list of 10 of the coolest keyboard shortcuts you never knew about. MacLife
Post a Comment
Read more

Facebook SDK 3.0 Beta for iOS

1. Better user session management: In the past, managing auths, user sessions and tokens was hard. We've spent a lot of time working to make these takes easier for you. This release introduces FBSession, which manages, stores and refreshes user tokens with default behaviors you can override. It uses the block metaphor to notify your app when a user's token changes state. 2. Ready-to-Use Native UI Views: This SDK release includes a variety of pre-built user interface (UI) components for common functions. You can quickly drop them into your apps instead of building each one from scratch or using dialogs. This gives you a fast, native and consistent way to build common features. 3. Modern Objective-C language features support: With Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), you no longer have to spend as much time on memory management. Support for blocks means that it’s now more straightforward to handle sessions and calls to asynchronous Facebook APIs. This, along with inclusion o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Writing High-Performance Swift Code

Enabling Optimizations Whole Module Optimizations (WMO) Reducing Dynamic Dispatch Dynamic Dispatch Advice: Use 'final' when you know the declaration does not need to be overridden Advice: Use 'private' and 'fileprivate' when declaration does not need to be accessed outside of file Advice: If WMO is enabled, use 'internal' when a declaration does not need to be accessed outside of module Using Container Types Efficiently Advice: Use value types in Array Advice: Use ContiguousArray with reference types when NSArray bridging is unnecessary Advice: Use inplace mutation instead of object-reassignment Wrapping operations Advice: Use wrapping integer arithmetic when you can prove that overflow cannot occur Generics Advice: Put generic declarations in the same module where they are used The cost of large Swift values Advice: Use copy-on-write semantics for large values Unsafe code Advice: Use unmanaged references to avoid reference counting overhead Protocols Ad...
Post a Comment
Read more