Siri

An Apple patent published today describes how Siri could interject in iMessage chats to do things like help schedule meetings based on the location and availability of chat participants.

In one illustration, when one chat participant asks ‘How long ’til you guys get here?’ Siri interjects by checking everyone’s location and then answering the question. In another, a chat participant asks Siri when the group could get together for lunch, and it checks each of their diaries to offer slots when all are free …

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With iOS 10, Apple added the ability for six categories of application to integrate with the iOS personal assistant, Siri. One of these groups was mobile payments. The PayPal app for iOS has now been updated with this integration, so you can use natural language voice queries to send and receive money.

Using your contact address book, queries like ‘Hey Siri send David $20 using PayPal’ will bring up a confirmation sheet in the Siri conversation with one button to confirm.

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We learned two years ago that Apple was setting up an R&D center in Cambridge, England, to tap academic research expertise. Business Insider thinks it knows the focus of the work the team there is performing.

Those working inside are aiming to make Siri talk more naturally, according to a source that knows a number of Apple’s Cambridge employees […]

Apple’s Cambridge office is home to less than 30 people, including many of the employees from VocalIQ — a voice recognition startup that was spun out from the university and acquired by Apple in 2015.

VocalIQ is a tool specifically geared to allowing truly conversational queries …

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With the release of Google Assistant, supplanting Google Now on the new Pixel with Android 7.1, Google’s speech recognition/AI engine is supposed to be more personable and less robotic. At the same time, Apple has been improving the accuracy and intelligence of Siri, which has until now been a distant second in the assistant space when it comes to accuracy. With the below video comparing iPhone 7 Plus and the the Pixel XL, YouTuber MKBHD shows that both have come a long way…
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While Siri did get smarter with the launch of iOS 10, it’s still widely believed that the Apple’s virtual assistant lags behind offering from Google and even the original creators of Siri. Today, tech veteran Walt Mossberg penned a column that asks the question, “Why does Siri seem so dumb?”

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As regular readers will know, I’m a long-time fan of Siri. It’s my default way to interact with my iPhone: from checking the weather forecast through opening apps to dictating text messages. It was the sole reason I upgraded from the iPhone 4 to the 4S back in the day.

At the same time, I’ve also long wanted Siri to do more. Last month, Apple finally granted the request I made last year: to give her access to third-party apps. But I was also hoping then for more – much more – while Apple seems to be content to expand Siri’s capabilities at a relatively leisurely pace.

Many of Siri’s original developers, it turned out, had also grown frustrated at Apple’s apparent lack of ambition for the intelligent assistant. They wanted to proceed at a much faster pace, and finally parted company with Apple to develop a next-generation assistant, Viv. The demonstration they gave back in May seriously impressed me, and I said then than Viv was what Siri should always have become …

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Now that Siri has finally arrived on the Mac, Apple’s intelligent assistant just got a whole lot more useful. But some users are finding that this has only increased their frustration – because the service is unable to cope with more than one language.

Making Siri bilingual might, at first glance, seem an unreasonable request. After all, it’s taken speech recognition a very long time indeed to reliably understand one language at a time. I first tried a prototype system way back in the 1980s, when it was utterly hopeless. I’d try another one every few years, but it’s only in the past seven or eight years that it’s been any good.

But there are many places in the world where it’s extremely common to speak more than one language. In particular, speaking English and a local language is the norm in many countries. Which means that you may well be speaking to Siri in English but asking it to find, for example, a German place. Or speaking to Siri in Dutch but asking it to call someone with an English name …

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Amazon Echo speaker with intelligent voice assistant

We first heard suggestions that Apple was working on its own equivalent to Amazon’s Echo – an intelligent voice-controlled assistant in a speaker – in the run-up to WWDC back in May. A subsequent report suggested that the device would feature a camera capable of facial-recognition to identify household members and set preferences.

Little more has been heard since then, but a new Bloomberg report says that the product now exists in prototype form and has begun testing outside the lab …

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At WWDC earlier this summer, Apple announced that iOS 10 would bring a host of new features to its Siri virtual assistant, the biggest of which being integration with third-party applications. With the public launch of iOS 10 nearing, Nathan Olivarez-Giles of the WSJ has had an opportunity to go hands-on with the more capable and more powerful Siri, calling it a “long-overdue” enhancement…

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A more intelligent and connected Siri has been one of the flagship features of recent iOS updates, and Steven Levy at Backchannel has a new interview with Apple execs that features a behind-the-scenes look at what goes in to Apple’s artificially intelligent assistant. The piece begins by detailing Siri’s voice recognition upgrade in 2014 when the system moved “to a neural-net based system” for US users and mentions yet another upgrade coming with iOS 10…

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Siri now has so many capabilities that it’s hard to keep track of all the things it can do. You can ask Siri itself, of course, and it will show you a bunch of examples – but those are just a sampling. A new website is aiming to provide a comprehensive list of all the questions and commands Siri can process …

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At this year’s WWDC 2016, Apple introduced the only feature I really cared about seeing making its move onto macOS: Siri. The voice assistant had finally found its way onto the next obvious platform. While I was excited to see it available, I wasn’t ecstatic to see it would take a keyboard shortcut or icon click to launch it. That requirement made it feel like a step back in a world where nearly all of Apple’s devices had begun moving to hands-free Siri activation. Thanks to a tip on Reddit, however, that is no longer the case if you’re willing to do a little work upfront…

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Apple is bringing some clever intelligence for Siri with iOS 10, in addition to the publicly-announced features like third-party app integration. Thanks to a reader tip, we’ve discovered a clever enhancement for Siri on iPhones and iPads running iOS 10. When using ‘Hey Siri’ voice activation in a room with multiple nearby devices, only one device will respond. For example, with iOS 10 installed, an iPhone 6s is smart enough to stop listening for voice input if an iPad Pro is also listening.

Although both devices initially wake up, once one starts recognizing voice input, it appears to send a message to other nearby devices to cancel out the operation. This means that only one device keeps listening and prevents the naive havoc that happened on iOS 9, where all devices would try to answer the ‘Hey Siri’ question causing a confusing cacophony of sound from every nearby iPhone and iPad. You can see an example of this behavior in the video after the jump …

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Siri unlocks a new dimension of functionality in iOS 10, allowing third-party apps to integrate inline into the Siri voice assistant experience. Any developer integration expands utility of Siri dramatically but it’s important to note the limitations of the system Apple announced.

For iOS 10.0, the Siri API will only work with six kinds of application: ride booking (think Uber), messaging, Photo Search (find photos and videos in a particular app), payments (‘Send $100 to John with SquareCash’), VoIP Calling (e.g: Skype) and Workouts (for starting health and fitness activities) …

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macOS Sierra includes Siri, bringing voice-activated assistant to the Mac for the first time. You can search for files and folders, as well as the typical queries you would expect from Siri.

Whilst multitasking in other applications, you could also use Siri to activate music.

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It’s Monday, June 13th and Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is about to kick off with the company’s opening keynote and press event at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET.

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Siri is widely expected to make up a big part of Monday’s WWDC keynote (alongside iOS 10, macOS 10.12 and more) but it seems like it is already inadvertently tipping the hat on what is going to be announce. Brian Roemelle found that by asking the voice assistant about “windows” on his phone, Siri would start referencing the “Finder” app in its responses.

Obviously, iOS doesn’t have a Finder app but OS X does. It seems like Siri is unintentionally leaking the unveiling of Siri for Mac ahead of schedule, or perhaps even a brand new Finder app for iOS 10 …

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