Fair Suck Of The Sav For Siri, As Apple Works On OZ Accent

Archive, News by Computer Daily NewsNovember 13, 2011June 17, 2017 Share

Blimey. Apple has pushed out iOS 5.0.1, an update for its smartphone and tablet operating system that’s claimed to improve battery life, patch a bug found by expelled US programmer Charlie Miller – and enable “personal assistant” Siri to better understand Aussie accents.

Apple claimed the latest update “improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation,” but did not explain further. Perhaps Siri will explain all today, but presumably she is now able to understand phrases like, “g’day”, “upya, mate”, “ooroo, sport” and “fair suck of the sav”.

Meanwhile Apple has come the raw prawn with Charlie (Siri, that means they kicked the b*gger off the Apple developer network and might yet sue him – Ed.) after – rather than simply telling Apple about a bug he claimed to have discovered – Miller snuck an app onto the App Store that allowed any malicious developer to run unsigned code on the user’s iPhone or iPad.

Charlie claimed he was just doing a public service.

Oh, fair bloody go, as Siri might now say. Predictably there were outraged messages on some Web sites claiming Apple’s action was yet another case of Cupertino’s high-handed fascist-style repression of the inalienable rights of code cutters to do absolutely anything they want on other people’s computers without their owner’s knowledge,

The new iOS upgrade is also claimed to fix complaints about Apple smartphone battery life following the recent release of iOS 5. There have been beefs by some users that the upgrade hasn’t completely fixed the problem but – as with the supposed “antennagate” problem that last year occupied a lot of column inches – it seems few people have actually been affected, and the update seems to fix most of those.

Should that not be the case, there is nothing to stop supposedly affected folk returning their phones to iOS4.