Siri

Pretty much every tech company has been investing in generative AI for the past two years, and Apple is rumored to finally bring new AI-based tools to iPhone users soon with iOS 18. However, the costs of operating such tools are quite high, and Meta has just confirmed that it will take years for the company to make money from AI.

People have been complaining about Siri for years now, arguing that it’s fallen behind the likes of Alexa and Google Assistant. With clear evidence that 2024 is going to see dramatic improvements in Apple’s AI features, will iOS 18 Siri finally turn things around?

I’m very much hoping the answer is yes, and think there are three clues which provide some reason for optimism …

An Apple research paper describes how the company has been developing Ferret-UI, a generative AI system specifically designed to be able to make sense of app screens.

The paper is somewhat vague about the potential applications of this – likely deliberately so – but the most exciting possibility would be to power a much more advanced Siri …

Siri launched with the iPhone 4S in October 2011, replacing Voice Control with a more capable virtual assistant. A dozen years later, Siri has evolved into the primary way we interact with our Apple products.

Wait, no, I’m being told Siri sounds more natural but the core technology is roughly the same. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence now means generative AI and chat bots are based on large language models.

Siri and the rest of iOS 18 will join the AI revolution in June, ending our long national nightmare of Siri being somewhere between hot garbage and kinda useful sometimes. At least that’s what’s being reported, but we don’t really have a great sense of what to expect yet.

iOS 17.4 introduces the ability to assign languages to Siri specifically for when it reads your messages to you. Languages can be different than the assigned language used for Siri for all other tasks. This is useful for when you primarily use Siri in one language, but you chat with people using other languages.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a message for Wall Street. He believes Apple “break new ground” on generative AI this year. Cook’s latest AI hype comments came today during Apple’s annual shareholders meeting.

A next generation Siri version is set to be powered by a generative AI chatbot, with analysts expecting it to be launched with iOS 18, and announced at this year’s WWDC.

While Apple has been criticized for the way that Siri has lagged behind, a new report says that this is because the company is aiming to be far more ambitious than existing generative AI systems …

Via Bloomberg, Apple is closing an office in San Diego, which housed part of the Data Operations Annotations group, which evaluates Siri customer responses and helps improve accuracy of the system, among other duties.

The reorganization impacts 121 jobs in San Diego. Apple has offered all affected employees jobs at its Austin, Texas, offices if they are willing to relocate.

A leaker with a mixed track-record says that Apple will use this year’s WWDC to announce some new Siri generative AI capabilities.

The post is vague, stating only that it will “add more personalization and natural conversations to Siri,” with just a few other elements …

What’s “one perk of fame,” according to Barbra Streisand? Phoning up the CEO of Apple when Siri doesn’t pronounce your name correctly.

Since the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, many people have wondered when Apple will introduce its own generative AI. Rumors suggest that this could happen next year. Until then, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been talking a lot about AI in recent months and has now reinforced that Apple is investing in generative AI.

The vast majority of my smart home control comprises asking Siri to activate a scene – or having one automatically triggered by a time or event. For example, when going to bed, a single command switches on low lighting in the bedroom while switching off all other lights in the home.

Most of these scenes are created from scratch, thinking about exactly what I want to happen in particular circumstances – but there’s another approach I’d like to be able to take …

Ace reporter Wayne Ma has a new scoop about a feature likely coming to Siri in iOS 18. The upcoming feature is revealed in a new report that details Apple’s ongoing efforts to invest in conversational AI.

In what appears to be a new feature in the latest iOS beta, Siri explains Conversation Awareness the first time it is activated.

Without the message, people might be confused as to why the volume has suddenly reduced itself on their Airpods Pro 2 …

Disabled people who rely on Apple’s accessibility features say that Voice Control has fallen behind Siri in both accuracy and capabilities, despite being an essential rather than a nice-to-have.

They say it’s frustrating to see the Cupertino company continue to make improvements to Siri, while Voice Control – which is key to many disabled people being able to use Apple tech – has apparently been forgotten …

Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant, which was introduced in 2014 back when Windows Phone was still a thing. Similar to Siri, Cortana lets users perform a number of tasks using voice commands. But it seems Microsoft is giving up on its old virtual assistant, as the latest Windows 11 update kills the Cortana app. The reason? The company will now bet on AI instead.

In July, we heard from Mark Gurman that Apple is internally testing a generative AI chatbot and that the company may make a “significant AI-related announcement” in 2024. Now, the latest analyst note from Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that generative AI features may not come to Apple hardware for consumers next year.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Apple had been internally testing Siri support in Hebrew for the HomePod with iOS 16.4 – and there was even a video of the new language in action on a HomePod mini running an internal beta build. Now with iOS 16.6 and tvOS 16.6, Apple is officially rolling out Siri in Hebrew for both HomePod and Apple TV.

News that Apple has developed its own generative AI model – dubbed Apple GPT – caused a little flurry of excitement yesterday, with John Gruber noting that it caused AAPL’s stock price to briefly spike by 2.7%

Even investors seemed to quickly realise that the news doesn’t mean much, however, as most of that gain was lost by the end of the day …

This week, Apple released the third beta of iOS 17 to developers, and while the update doesn’t add any major features compared to previous betas, it does come with some minor changes. One of those is the addition of new voice options for Siri in German.