Speech-to-text technology can be seen on your iPhone in various places, from the Dictation tool to Apple's new behind-the-scenes, auto-created transcripts for podcast episodes. Your iPhone also has some pretty impressive text-to-speech capabilities. With them, your iPhone can read webpages, documents, or whatever text is on the screen out loud to you — only some of these tools aren't easy to find.
Safari isn't the only web browser on your iPhone or iPad that will let you add icons to your Home Screen for progressive web apps and website bookmarks. Apple gave developers the key to its "Add to Home Screen" feature, and your favorite iOS or iPadOS web browser may already support it.
Apple Notes started with humble beginnings as a scratchpad of sorts, a place for us to stash some simple text for later. It's received many upgrades over the years, but Apple's latest iPhone software update is a game-changer.
Your iPhone has a powerful feature that can keep your secrets hidden from other people, and you'll never have to worry about sharing or showing someone something embarrassing or incriminating ever again.
Apple's upcoming iOS 17 is expected to include many new features first seen on Android, but there are also some exciting, unique features that Android needs to steal pronto.
Whenever you're on a FaceTime call, you can use SharePlay on your iPhone or iPad to screen share, watch TV or movies together, work out with each other, and even listen to the same music at the same time. SharePlay also recently received a new skill that turns FaceTime into a portable gaming platform.
Apple's Notes app has an important feature many users overlook, yet it's arguably the most crucial thing you should use for all your notes synced across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and iCloud.com. And Apple makes the feature much easier to use than years before, so there's no reason you shouldn't be using it.
For the avid multitasker, listening to audiobooks and podcasts is the ultimate way to passively absorb knowledge while performing other activities — but there are other options. You can turn any written text on your Android phone into speech that's read aloud to you, so there's virtually no limit on what you can soak up audibly from your headphones or speaker.
You're probably sharing a ton of information on your iPhone with other people, apps, and services without really realizing it. Now there's a new tool to show you just how much, and it can be an eye-opener as well as a fast way to manage sharing permissions and review your account security.
If you can't access your iCloud data such as emails, contacts, calendars, photos, notes, reminders, files, and other documents via a web browser on untrusted devices, like one at a library or friend's house, there's an easy way to regain access.
It's easy to copy text from webpages, messages, documents, and other views on your Android device — except when it isn't. Many apps block or prohibit text selection, forcing you to take screenshots or write out the whole excerpt manually. But you don't have to resort to those methods since there's a simple workaround to selecting and copying text from uncooperative apps.
When you need to take notes, sketch out projects, brainstorm with others, create mood boards, or map out ideas without constraints, look no further than Freeform, Apple's new collaboration-friendly digital whiteboard.
Safari has a major new feature for your iPhone, something that will change how you share, receive, and interact with links — and nobody is talking about it. The feature works on the latest iOS software, as well as the latest iPadOS and macOS versions. Still, you won't find any information about it in Safari's app or settings, so it's pretty hidden if you haven't seen it by accident yet.
You may prefer reading news stories, web articles, and books on your iPhone over listening to them in spoken form. Still, sometimes it's necessary when driving, walking, cycling, cleaning, working, or performing other activities requiring a little multitasking. To help you out, Apple has a text-to-speech service on your iPhone — you just need to know how to find and set it up.
If you use the Notes app on your iPhone and haven't updated to the newest software yet, you're missing out on some pretty valuable upgrades that improve smart folders, note security, collaboration, and more. So what are you waiting for?
Google Voice has a hidden feature that lets you record any phone call you're participating in, and unlike other apps, it doesn't cost a dime.
Apple's Shortcuts app lets you make and use custom icons for any app on your iPhone, but it won't actually replace any icons. If your goal is to change the official icon for the app itself without any redirects, there's a growing list of third-party apps that'll let you do just that.
The hottest word game right now is Wordle, a simple game that gives you six chances to guess the five-letter word of the day. I've already shown how you can add the real Wordle app — not a fake clone — to your iPhone or Android phone's home screen. But there's also a way to save Wordle for offline gameplay for years to come.
The new Material You theme engine with its fancy widgets is a sexy change for Android, but there's another new Android 12 feature that's more than just pretty colors and curves.
Just hours after an early leak via Twitter, Facebook and Ray-Ban have officially released their new wearable collaboration.
Amid a troubling resurgence in coronavirus cases, led by the new Delta variant, augmented reality is once again moving back into the spotlight as a solution, especially now that the move to return to offices has been stalled.
Facebook's earnings calls are generally focused on numbers—revenue and user growth. But this week the company's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, carved out a significant portion of the call to elaborate on Facebook's plans for immersive computing.
The Lens Studio community, now made up of more than 200,000 creators, has generated some impressive augmented reality effects in the last few years. Amazingly, the groundbreaking Lenses for Snapchat continue to come, often from the internal AR team at Snap.
Apple released the second beta for iOS 15 on Thursday, June 24. The update includes FaceTime's "SharePlay" feature for the first time, a new Maps icon, updates to Focus mode, in addition to many other changes and bug fixes.
Ever since Facebook announced its partnership with Luxxotica brand Ray-Ban to produce smartglasses, the augmented reality space has been on high alert awaiting more details.
Over the past few weeks, Google, Snap, and Facebook have all taken their turns to show off their new augmented reality technologies. This week, it was Apple's turn, with new AR features for iOS 15 along with new capabilities for developers.
The Shortcuts app can help you play the next unlistened podcast from one of the shows, but getting the latest unplayed episodes from your whole queue of shows in the Podcasts app is a little trickier. There is an easy way to do it on your iPhone, though, and you can even automate it so that Podcasts plays your most recent untouched episode automatically.
Apple's iMessage is one of the main reasons to use an iPhone, and there's a lot you can do in chats without being overly complicated. But there's one issue that continues to drive people nuts, and that's the blue typing bubble indicator with the moving ellipsis (•••). Can you stop it? Not officially, but there are workarounds.
If you like to listen to popular songs from huge musicians and hard-to-find music from obscure indie artists, SoundCloud is for you — and you don't have to pay a dime. When you find a song you really love and want to play it back even when you're not connected to the internet, SoundCloud has offline listening, but there is a way to download your favorite tracks onto your iPhone for longevity.
Two brands with affinities for augmented reality, Marvel and the NBA, joined forces to inject some AR superpowers into Monday night's matchup of the Golden State Warriors and New Orleans Pelicans.
If you're like me, you're not too keen on being tracked. So when an app asks you if it can track your iPhone activity across other programs and websites for ads or data brokers, the answer is pretty much always "no." If you're tired of choosing "Ask App Not to Track" over and over again, there is a way to stop apps from even being able to ask in the first place.
While there's no denying that iPads are better when it comes to multitasking and productivity, your iPhone has a few tricks up its sleeve to rival even the best iPad features. One thing about iPadOS is that it's really easy to highlight editable text with gestures, but it's just as simple on iOS if you know all the secrets.
If you need to share something online but don't want your personal information attached to the file, use an anonymous file hosting site. By uploading files anonymously, you keep your IP address safe and won't need to create any kind of account that could provide further logging. You can do this in a web browser, but it's much easier to do using a shortcut on your iPhone.
The Pixel 5 is a great value proposition in this era of $1,500 phones. With its reasonable price tag, fully open-sourced software, and unlockable bootloader, it's also an ideal phone for rooting.
GTFOBins and LOLBAS are projects with the goal of documenting native binaries that can be abused and exploited by attackers on Unix and Windows systems, respectfully. These binaries are often used for "living off the land" techniques during post-exploitation. In this tutorial, we will be exploring gtfo, a tool used to search these projects for abusable binaries right from the command line.
There's a set of drawing tools that have been available for a long time on the iPhone that helps you create handwritten notes and sketches. It's great when you need a free-form way to capture your ideas, and now it's even better. Apple added shape recognition in iOS 14 so that you can now draw geometrically perfect shapes using finger doodles, giving the older shapes tool a run for its money.
Apple just released the first beta for iOS 14.2 to iPhone software testers today, Monday, Sept. 21. This update brings a new Control Center tile for Shazam music recognition, a redesigned Now Playing Control Center tile, and a new "People Detection" feature in Magnifier.
You might be giving out your name to every stranger you see, and you don't even know it. That iPhone of yours has a name — generally a combination of your first name and device model — and it broadcasts it to others via AirDrop, Personal Hotspot, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and other connections. Sure, it's useful to keep your device name simple and to the point, but there are upsides to changing it.
If you are reading this article right now on your Galaxy Note 20, you are using one of the most powerful smartphones on the market — but are you taking full advantage of it? The answer is likely no, but you can change this with a few apps.
When it comes to washing clothes, the laundry symbols on your tags might as well be hieroglyphics. They're difficult to interpret, easy to forget, and even easier to ignore. But if you don't want to ruin expensive designer clothes, blankets, and other fiber-based materials, you need to figure out the meaning behind those tiny icons. Thankfully, your iPhone can help out.