Apple could make a welcome change to the way one interacts with the voice assistant.
Siri will celebrate its 12th birthday this year, and while Apple has regularly upgraded its voice assistant over the major versions of iOS, its performance has always been below what its direct competitors offer (Amazon with Alexa and Google Assistant).
A pioneering voice assistant, but lagging behind
There are many criticisms of Siri. Users often criticize the limited number of areas handled by the assistant, and believe that the technology is often just good enough to turn on the connected light bulbs in their home, send a short message or write down a reminder, but not much more.
The other recurring criticism comes from the keyword “Hey Siri”, which allows the remote triggering of the assistant on his iPhone, Mac or HomePod connected speaker.
Unlike Alexa or “OK Google”, the word Siri can generally be misinterpreted by Apple’s technology and confused with other similarly sounded words. We no longer count the number of false positives, when the assistant is triggered suddenly, for no apparent reason, during a simple discussion.
Apple would nevertheless have found a way to simplify access to its assistant, and it could arrive on our devices in just a few weeks.
Siri would lose its “Say” to facilitate conversation
According to the always well-informed Mark Gurman, of BloombergApple should announce that the keyword “Hey Siri” will be replaced with iOS 17 by the simple request “Siri”.
If the news may seem anecdotal for ordinary mortals, this new order ” is a technical challenge that requires a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work “recalls Mark Gurman. Apple must indeed train its voice recognition systems to eliminate errors and approximations as much as possible in all the languages supported by the voice assistant.
Apple could also introduce deeper integration into third-party apps than today, where Siri is only available for a few categories of apps. It will still be necessary to convince the developers of the relevance of implementing Siri in their software during the sessions which will be reserved for them during the WWDC.
Siri is however a central point of Apple’s strategy in the coming years. As you probably know, the manufacturer should announce its very first mixed reality headset in the next few hours, and would refuse to offer controllers to navigate the interfaces. In addition to gesture controls, the voice assistant will be at the heart of the product to access the various services offered, despite criticism from the designers of the headset, appalled by the laborious results of the voice assistant.
Apple has no choice but to beef up its technology, and at the same time prove that the firm is not lagging behind on the other hot topic of Tech today, namely artificial intelligence. .
Source : MacRumors
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