‘Hey Siri’ Could Just Become ‘Siri’ As Apple Looks to Improve the Virtual Assistant Experience
While Apple is way ahead in the hardware game compared to Google, the search giant also does do a few things better. One of them would be Google Assistant, which is a whole lot more natural while responding to user queries compared to Siri.
Now that could be changing soon, as Mark Gurman has revealed in his latest Bloomberg Newsletter that the Cupertino giant is working to improve the Siri experience within the next few years. For a start, Apple might drop the “Hey Siri” trigger and simplify it to just “Siri“, followed by a command.
While that might seem like a small change, making the switch is a technical challenge that requires a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work.
Apple has been working on the change for several months and—if all goes to plan—hopes to roll out the switch either next year or the year after. The company has been testing the simplified wake word with employees and collecting the necessary training data.
That is not all, the company is also planning to integrate Siri on a deeper level with some third-party apps. For example, if you look at Google assistant, it has a ton of integrations with different third-party services, which allows it to pull in a lot of information and perform complicated tasks like checking hotel and flight information or getting movie or show recommendations.
While until a few years back smart assistant on phones weren’t really of much use, but after the advent of smart home devices and wearables, Apple can’t afford to fall back. There’s also a lot of competition in this space now too, where Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri are battling it out to be your virtual assistant of choice. And for the winner, the biggest prize of all, data!
