Report: Apple ramping up Siri improvement efforts as hiring hits new all-time high

Following last month’s release of HomePod, which puts Siri inside of a $349 smart speaker, Apple appears to be ramping up Siri hiring. According to hiring data tracked by Thinknum, job openings for Siri-related positions at Apple are at an all-time high…

Apple’s job listings indicate that it currently has 161 openings for jobs that contain the term “Siri” in their title or description. That number is up 24 percent over the last month and at its all-time high:

According to hiring data that we track at Thinknum, the number of open positions that contain the term “Siri” has accelerated in recent weeks, with a current all-time high of 161 job listings posted today alone. This marks a jump in hiring for the keyword of 24% in just over a month.

As the chart below indicates, Siri hiring has been increasing since spring of 2017, though it really spiked last month.

The overwhelming majority of Siri job openings are in Santa Clara Valley at Apple’s new headquarters, with 125 of the 161 openings being for that area. There are also openings for San Francisco, Shanghai, Cambridge, and more.

In terms of departments, 154 of the listings are for software engineering jobs, while there is 1 listing for design, 3 for product management, and 3 for information systems and technology.

As for patterns in the job titles, the most common title is “Siri – Software Engineer”, of which there are 5 positions. With three positions, “Siri – iOS Engineer” has three replicated openings.

The rest is a smattering of engineering skillsets, from Infrastructure Engineers, to Machine Learning Engineers, to Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineers.

Siri has been heavily criticized for lagging behind other smart assistants on the market, such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. While it’s hard to grasp too many details of job listings, this spike certainly seems to indicate that Apple is trying to ramp up efforts to compete with Amazon and Google.

Subscribe to 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: