Top 5 iOS 8 Features You’ll Love!
There’s still quite a few things to celebrate with the new iOS 8 firmware. Here are my Top 5 iOS 8 Features I think you’ll love!
1. Real-Time Voice Dictation
This is a great improvement over the older iOS 7 iPhone voice dictation app, because now when you hit the microphone button next to the space bar to enable voice dictation on your iPhone, you will see “real time” voice dictation when you start speaking. No more waiting until your are completely finished with every sentence and hitting the done button to see what’s been typed. I must admit that I really love this new iOS 8 feature and it’s pretty fast and accurate too! It’s a works great when you’re transcribing emails, text messages or notes.
2. Hands-Free Siri
Did you know that you can now use Siri hands free? Well you can, the only downside is that your iPhone has to be plugged into a power source, but once you get over that, hands-free Siri is pretty cool. In order to get Siri’s attention, you won’t have to touch your home button at all, you’ll just say “Hey Siri”. To turn this feature on go to Settings > General > Siri > Allow “Hey Siri”, now you’re all set. Siri has other updated iOS 8 features as well, including HomeKit, Shazaam and More search options as well. I just hope she can understand me better with the new iOS 8 updates, because I feel Siri was not quite as good as Google Voice at recognizing what I was saying. Hopefully this update changes my opinion, stay tuned…
3. Battery Usage By Apps
I’ve noticed on my iPhone 6 that although it seems like my battery lasts a little longer than it did with my iPhone 5, I still struggle with trying to extend the battery life on my iPhone. With iOS 8 you can now see the apps that are using the most of your battery and make adjustments from there. To use this top iOS 8 feature go to: Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage and you’ll find the culprit apps draining the battery and you can check the last 24 hours or the last 7 days.
4. Custom iPhone Keyboards
At last Apple has finally added the option of custom keyboards to iOS 8! Now if you’re like me and jailbreak your iPhones, you know this is nothing new, now it’s great to have this feature right out of the box. There are a host of keyboard apps available in the app store, however the most popular ones include: Gif Keyboard, Swype and Swiftkey. Check out the video below to see a Swiftkey iPhone keyboard demo.
5. Send Messages Using Audio
Apple has added several great new features to the messages app in iOS 8 and on of those top 5 iOS 8 features is the ability to send an audio message instead of text. I think this is pretty cool because sometimes text messages can get misunderstood in the translation. Using the audio feature will allow you to send a quick message, while not having to engage in a long phone conversation! Take a look at the video below to see some of the other changes in the iOS messages app.
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