Here’s a bit from Fandango’s announcement:

iOS 6.1 makes it convenient to purchase tickets through Fandango’s award-winning mobile app. Using iOS devices, moviegoers simply ask Siri to find a specific movie, nearby theaters or desired showtimes. Siri then offers the option to “Buy Tickets” and launches the Fandango app for customers to complete their ticket purchase. For added convenience, moviegoers can add their Paperless Mobile Tickets to Passbook, which lets them scan their iPhone or iPod touch to get into the movie at select theaters.

“Fandango is committed to innovating across all platforms and helping shape the future of moviegoing,” said Paul Yanover , President of Fandango. “With this new Siri feature, movie fans can quickly and easily discover the nearest theaters, find the most convenient showtimes, and buy tickets through Fandango to help make movie night perfect.”

The feature can be used on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices (though we may see Siri make her way to Macs at some point).

image via 9to5Mac

It appears, however, that Apple isn’t completely satisfied with the level of wit coming from Siri. In fact, it appears that they may have hired a writer to “refresh and refine” Siri’s dialogue.

It all comes from a job posting, hosted on LinkedIn.

“We’re looking for a uniquely creative individual to help us evolve and enrich Siri, our virtual personal assistant. Siri’s known for ‘her’ wit, cultural knowledge, and zeal to explain things in engaging, funny, and practical ways. The ideal candidate is someone who combines a love for language, wordplay, and conversation with demonstrated experience in bringing creative content to life within an intense technical environment,” says Apple.

The posting was made on January 9th, and when you click through to the actually Apple job site, it now reads “Sorry, this job is no longer available.” Either Apple scrapped the listing or they’ve already hired their new Siri writer.

For the job, Apple was looking for someone with “excellent overall writing skills” and a “great vocabulary and cross-cultural knowledge.” Knowing multiple languages was noted as a big plus. Apple said that they wanted the writer to “help evolve Siri as a distinct, recognizable character.”

So, Siri users: you might have a more engaging, wittier companion to converse with in the near future.

[via Search Engine Land]

While these name didn’t crack the top ten for either sex, they definitely saw significant gains this year. The name “Apple” saw its popularity increase by 15% this year for girls (that’s a jump of 585 spots on the list). Of course, we’ve seen the name “Apple” given to a baby based on a non-tech motivation, so it’s unclear whether the company had a direct tie to this spike. Even though it’s also a popular name in Scandinavia, it would be hard to deny Apple’s influence on “Siri,” which jumped 5% on BabyCenter’s list.

“Mac,” also saw a 12% rise. Steve didn’t make the top 10, however.

On the space front, names like “Sky,” “Star,” “Stella,” and “Mars” all saw their stock rise. And as you would expect, masturbatory megahit Fifty Shades of Grey seemed to have an impact on mothers this year – the name “Grey” saw a whopping 20% jump.

FYI, the top overall names for boys this year were “Aiden,” “Jackson,” and “Ethan.” The top three names for girls were “Sophia,” “Emma,” and “Olivia.”

“A unique or unusual name remains one of the top qualities parents seek in a baby name, but it’s trending down. What’s becoming more important to new parents is finding a name with meaning,” says Linda Murray, BabyCenter Global Editor in Chief. “Parents are looking for more substance in baby names. They want names with more significance. Meaning can come from the name itself (for example, Sophia means ‘wisdom’ and Aiden means ‘fiery’) or because the name is associated with a loved one or other inspiring person. This is a significant new trend in baby naming and one I’m delighted to see.”

Names with meaning? Tell that to little baby Hashtag.

Apple blog 9to5Mac is reporting, citing reliable sources, that early builds of OS X 10.9, expected to launch next year, include Siri and Maps integration. The Siri integration, according to the report, would be similar to that of iOS 6 on the latest iPad models.

As the publication notes, the early build including the features is no guarantee that they’ll be present when the OS is launched. It’s possible that they will not make it past testing phases, but it’s noteworthy enough that they’re in consideration for the Mac operating system. The presence of these features could go a long way in securing user adoption, as there are no doubt plenty of Mac users who are not using iPhones or iPads.

Competition isn’t exactly decreasing for either Siri or Maps, so utilizing its hugely popular Mac lines should be a major step for Apple in this regard.

Apple will obviously continue to improve upon both features in the meantime. The maps product has been highly controversial among iOS users, and word is that Google is getting closer to having its Maps app on the operating system. A forthcoming update to iOS is expected to have Siri improvements, including the ability to purchase movie tickets.

With the following video, Gizmodo set out to find out. It looks like in most cases (at least the cases on display here), Google has the edge in speed for sure, though at least one case shows that Google’s answer isn’t always the better one.

According to a report from 9to5Mac, which cites developers who are beta testing the new version of the OS, Siri will go so far as to let you purchase tickets. It does so through Fandango, if you have the app installed on your device. If you don’t have it installed, it will reportedly bring up a button to download it. Good news for Fandango.

To activate this functionality of Siri, you can reportedly say things like, “Three tickets to see Brave,” “Buy four tickets to see Toy Story 3 tonight in San Jose,” “Two tickets to Tangled at the City Theater at 9pm,” or “Two tickets to that new Pixar movie.” These commands come from the actual Siri info menu.

It sounds like you can use a pretty broad range of command styles and get it to work, although this is always the kind of thing you have to see in action before you can really give it too much praise. It all sounds wonderful in theory, but as many Siri users know, she doesn’t always get the point right away.

The functionality will only be available in the U.S. at first. According to 9to5Mac, it is also not compatible will all movie theaters, so it may not be quite as useful as it should be. Of course, it is still in beta, so there is room for improvement.

image via 9to5Mac

“When you have a question, finding the answer should be effortless—wherever you are and whatever device you’re using,” says Google Search engineer Kenneth Bongort. “The new Google Search app for iPhone and iPad helps you to do just that with enhanced voice search that answers any question with the comprehensive Google search results you know and love.”

Take a look:

“Fast and accurate voice recognition technology enables Google to understand exactly what you’re saying,” says Bongort. “Getting an answer is as simple as tapping on the microphone icon and asking a question like, ‘Is United Airlines flight 318 on time?’ Your words appear as you speak, you get your answer immediately and—if it’s short and quick, like the status and departure time of your flight—Google tells you the answer aloud.”

The app makes use of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which continues to expand in breadth. Because of this, you can ask it questions about sports stadiums, trailers for movies, time changes, and television casts, to name a few.

iOS users are still waiting for a new Google Maps app.

Apple has hired William Strasior to run Siri, according to Kara Swisher at All Things D. Apple has already been making moves to improve Siri, and the hiring of Strasior has major implications for the direction Apple takes the product in.

With iOS 6, Siri gained the ability to understand more languages and it now works in more countries. It also added sports scores and stats, movie showtimes and reviews, and restaurant reservations. “Even have Siri open your apps for you — no tapping required,” Apple says on its website. “Say ‘Launch Flight Tracker’ or ‘Open Angry Birds’ and Siri does just that. You can also use Siri to post Facebook updates and tweet for you.”

Clearly, Apple was already designing Siri to take on Google in some areas, and these areas are sure to increase in number.

That’s where the hiring of Stasior gets interesting. He comes from Amazon where he was in charge of A9, Amazon’s search and advertising unit. Here’s what his resume (pdf) says about that:

A founder and now President / CEO of A9.com, a company with a mission to create groundbreaking technologies in search, advertising, and mobile that power customer centric, internet businesses. A9 is a fully owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, head quartered in Palo Alto, with roughly 200 employees and operations in Ireland, Germany, Romania, India, China, and Japan. A9 provides the core search service, as well advertising services, and image recognition technologies to Amazon.com and other websites. Prior to founding A9, led product and engineering for the Search & Navigation team at Amazon.

He used to work at AltaVista as the director of advanced development, where he worked on next generation search technologies.

With Apple’s giant user base, and recent trend of ditching Google products. This is going to be a very interesting narrative to keep an eye on, while certainly only helping Google’s argument against it being a monopoly.

Apple is not the only Google competitor to make a significant hire this week. Yahoo, now led by longtime, prominent Googler Marissa Mayer, just lured another noteworthy Googler away to fill the COO role at her company. That would be Henrique De Castro, who has been serving as Google’s President of Media, Mobile and Platforms Worldwide. So, that’s a pretty big position, and another blow to Google from Yahoo.

This is, by the way, only the latest in a series of Googlers who have jumped ship to join Mayer at Yahoo, which has been in the business of competing with Google since Google was invented – much longer than most of Google’s rivals.

Now there’s a parody of the commercial from Funny or Die, which goes the extra step of splicing in footage from the film. You can view it here, as the embedding has been disabled. It’s not really all that funny, so it’s up to you.

Of course, this isn’t the first time the commercial has been parodied. We shared this one last week:

Here’s another one that hit YouTube sometime in between those two (language NSFW):

As one of a handful of search announcements this week, Google announced that its new and improved voice search, announced for Android at Google I/O is coming soon to iOS (4.2+).

“Often the most natural way to ask a question is by asking aloud,” says Google’s Amit Singhal in the announcement. “So we’ve combined our speech recognition expertise, understanding of language and the Knowledge Graph so that Voice Search can better interpret your questions and sometimes speak the answers back as full sentences. This has been available on Android for a few weeks and people love it. It’ll soon be available on your iPhone or iPad (iOS version 4.2+).”

“You just need to tap the microphone icon and ask your question, the same way you’d ask a friend,” adds Singhal. “For example, ask ‘What movies are playing this weekend?’ and you’ll see your words streamed back to you quickly as you speak. Then Google will show you a list of the latest movies in theaters near you, with schedules and even trailers. It works for everything from celebrity factoids to the height of Kilamanjaro and more. When Google can supply a direct answer to your question, you’ll get a spoken response too.”

Now, obviously the feature is limited to Google search, and does not do all the things Siri can do, but it will be interesting to see how the feature competes with Siri on some types of information retrieval among iOS users.

The feature comes at a time when Google and Apple are growing further and further apart. Earlier this summer, Apple announced its new Maps offering, distancing itself from Google Maps, and just this week, it became known that Apple is also dropping its YouTube app. Of course, Google is just offering its own apps, which many users will no doubt use anyway.

This particular voice search feature appears to be just another way for Google to combat any souring relationship with Apple, and stay relevant to users.