If your friends made you talk to a robot and wait five minutes every time you called them, they’d stop being your friend and you’d stop calling them. The only person who can make those close to him run a gauntlet of machines and drones to have a conversation is Darth Vader. A business which makes you listen to every option in their...

You can probably thank Siri for this. Speech recognition isn’t exactly a new technology, but the “digital voice assistant” in the iPhone 4S has certainly encouraged us to start looking for things using our voices rather than typing with our fingers. Not to be outdone, Google has more than its fair share of voice-based...

I love my Android phone, but I can’t help but to be a little envious of my iFriends from time to time. While it wouldn’t be totally accurate that I wanted to have Siri on my phone, too, I thought it would be nice to have a true “voice assistant” on my smartphone. There are other so-called Siri clones out there...

I don’t know about you, but the “phone” part of my smartphone is really the least important part. It’s much more like a portable computer with its ability to let me update my social networks, check my email, play games, and so on. That’s a good thing, but it also comes with its fair share of problems too,...

There is an ongoing joke I have with many of my friends and colleagues. They say that I’m fueled solely by two things: coffee and WiFi…and I’ll be the first to admit that I can hardly live without either one of those necessities. While this Android app won’t help in the caffeine department, it can make sure that...

If you ask any book publisher, library or archivist, they will tell you decisively: Paper is out. Documents of all kinds are going digital. In fact, digitizing paper documents is already a multi-million dollar industry. Large, small, public, and private companies are all trading in their archaic paper-based filing systems for database-driven...

My smartphone is my life. It has everything on there. It’s from that Galaxy S that I check my schedule, send my text messages, update my Twitter, and fling fowl at some thieving swine. I can’t imagine the horror of losing my phone and, more importantly, the data that it contains. That’s why it is so important to have...

David Campell once said that “discipline is remembering what you want.” The quote carries a lot of truth in just a few words. Returning your focus to larger goals is a daily effort in discipline. In fact, in today’s age of smartphones, rapid-fire communication, and absurdly busy schedules, it has become even harder...

There are literally thousands of apps available through the Android Market and they range from silly games to stock tickers. Some are more useful than others, but if you’re actively engaged in social media, one of the best apps to manage your online social activities is HootSuite. This is no ordinary Twitter client. For starters,...

The modern office contains enough computer equipment to power the first Moon mission, but enough seething resentment to power World War III. A downtown skyscraper is a gleaming testament to mankind’s achievements, but all karmic monks see is a screaming black hole holding a knife. The combination of “having to deal with other people”...