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One of my favorite pastimes has to be pulling pranks around the office. The pranks may leave a sour taste in the mouth of the recipient for a few days, but in the end they often lead to some good laughs and classic memories.

April Fools' Day naturally lends itself to a flurry of random jokes and pranks, so I took the liberty of rounding up some tech-inspired pranks. I hope you find a way to put one, if not all of them, to use--heck, it doesn't even have to be on April 1!

Here, let me Google that for you Do you have a co-worker who refuses to look anything up on the Internet for himself? Do you often feel like your name should be "Google"? On April 1, send the lazy Web searcher a link to LMGTFY; perhaps he'll learn a thing or two.

To use LMGTFY, visit the site, type in a search query, and click on either search button. You will then be presented with a link to copy and send off to the unsuspecting recipient. The link you send will then open a Web page with an animation teaching the recipient how to use Google. After the site automatically fills in the search bar with the query and clicks on the search button, he will be redirected to the actual Google search results. … Read more

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Apple's third-generation iPad, officially available as of today, doesn't include all of the features we have come to love about Siri, but it does include Siri Dictation.

Siri Dictation is a voice-to-text solution, allowing you to speak what you want entered into a text field, and Siri will automagically type it for you.

You'll be given the option to enable dictation during the initial device setup. However, if you change your mind, you can disable (or enable) dictation by visiting Settings > General > Keyboard > Dictation.

With dictation enabled, you will see an extra … Read more

Chances are, you've sat through a few Siri commercials. A man gets instant traffic updates in his car. A boy gets the news that it's going to snow. A teenager pulls together a garage band rehearsal and gets Siri to call him "Rock God."

In real life, Siri sometimes takes awhile to think of an answer. Sometimes, it doesn't understand what the user is trying to say. Strong accents can be a challenge. Sometimes, its answers are wrong. Sometimes, it works just fine.

One iPhone 4S buyer in California was disappointed and frustrated enough recently … Read more

That feature add, unfortunately, hasn't yet been received with the highest regard. Apple's voice recognition assistant has caught on fairly well here in the U.S. (though a lawsuit claiming Siri isn't what Apple says it is was just filed), but in Japan one video shows Siri struggling on some more-advanced Japanese requests.

The side-by-side comparison below features an iPhone 4S with Siri and what appears to be an Android phone running Japanese wireless carrier DoCoMo's voice recognition feature, Syabette Concier. Reported by Kotaku (via AppleInsider), the video shows Siri's response time being slower than … Read more

Apple's been a little overzealous in the way it's advertised Siri, the voice assistant feature found on the company's latest iPhone, a new lawsuit claims.

iPhone 4S buyer Frank Fazio says the software feature simply didn't work like it did in Apple's television advertising. And now he's suing Apple in the Northern District of California.

"Promptly after the purchase of his iPhone 4S, [Fazio] realized that Siri was not performing as advertised," Fazio's complaint states. "For instance, when [Fazio] asked Siri for directions to a certain place, or to locate … Read more

Considering that Apple CEO Tim Cook began the new iPad launch event with statistics including how Siri is everybody's best friend, it's genuinely surprising that Cook didn't reveal Siri for the iPad.

There's still Apple's "voice dictation" software on the iPad, a feature that's tied to the keyboard and simply converts your spoken voice to written text. However, you won't be able to set reminders, search for the weather by asking if you need sunscreen, and there's no sassy, personality-driven bit of artificial intelligence responding back to you.

So why, then, after proclaiming Siri's wonders and exporting "her" to Japan, why after giving her French language skills and an Australian accent, would Apple get cold feet about wedding its anthropomorphic assistant to the iPad? … Read more

Though not yet out, the new iPad has already won over a healthy chunk of current iPad owners.

A full 42 percent of existing iPad owners said they'll buy the iPad 3, aka iPad HD, when it's released, according to a recent PriceGrabber survey. Among all the people surveyed by the site, 22 percent already own a tablet, and out of those, 52 percent own an iPad.

Conducted between February 23 and March 2, PriceGrabber's survey reached from 1,829 online shoppers in the U.S.

Of the current iPad owners who plan to buy the new … Read more

We start out today's show with a very important message to all you copycats out there: give credit where credit is due! And that's all we have to say about that.

Whew! Tomorrow's iPad event means we can finally stop talking about the elusive iPad...3? Or maybe it's the iPad HD? Or maybe it's the iPad YouKnowYouWantOne? We'll find out tomorrow, where undoubtedly a million points will get on the board. And then we can finally put that baby to rest.

Also on today's show, we talk about something not Apple related (if you can believe it), play our Yay or Nay game (copyright, trademark, all rights reserved 2012), and count how many accents Emily whips out. (Our last count was nine.)… Read more

As we well know from that recent video of a surly Scot trying to get Siri to fetch him a jammy dodger, misunderstandings can fast spell disaster during conversations between people and voice recognition software.

Check out this amusing parody by comedic duo Tripp and Tyler that envisions a future with "SuriTV." With rumors circulating regularly about the possible emergence of a real Apple TV, it seems like an appropriate time to imagine the positive and negative aspects of having Siri baked into the boob tube. … Read more