Apple is making a big change in how the Siri voice assistant works. While you currently have to say “Hey Siri” to activate the hands-free assistant, that may not be the case for much longer. Bloomberg Today I mentioned that Apple engineers are working on dropping the “Hey” part of the phrase, so you just have to say “Siri” followed by a command to activate the Assistant…
In its latest version employment Newsletter Bloombergs This is a “technical challenge that requires a great deal of AI training and basic engineering work,” Mark Gorman says. Apple is said to have been working on this change for the past several months and hopes to roll it out either next year or in 2024 depending on development and testing progress.
As is the case today, Apple is testing this change with employees and collecting necessary training data as part of this process. One specific challenge is making sure that Siri is able to understand the alert word in different accents and dialects.
Apple is also working on improvements to other aspects of Siri, including its integration into third-party apps and services. “It will integrate the voice assistant more deeply into third-party apps and services and improve its ability to understand users and take the right action,” Bloomberg says in today’s report.
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Apple’s job to change the Siri alert phrase from “Hey Siri” to “Siri” shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Doing so will match what Amazon has to offer, where you simply have to say “Alexa” to turn on the assistant, not “Hey Alexa”. It would also give Apple an edge over Google, where the alert phrase would be “Hey Google” or “OK Google”.
But as today’s report says, this is no small task and there is a lot of training and behind-the-scenes work that goes into a change like this. For Apple, this is especially true because Siri is already prone to a number of false positives especially with Siri activated on the HomePod.
What do you think of this change? Is it worth it or will it cause more headaches than it’s worth? Let us know in the comments.
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