Siri needs no introduction in the world of mobile phones. Apple has used the AI assistant on its products, primarily the iPhone, for several years. Now, new research is being done at Apple that aims to improve Siri’s communication skills and allow users to speak to her without even using wake words.
As reported by The Verge, a group of Apple researchers are conducting methods to use Siri without the need to use a wake word at all, meaning instead of saying “Siri” or “Hey Siri”, the AI assistant will be able to automatically detect when you’re trying to speak to it. “This problem is significantly more challenging than voice trigger detection,” said one of the researchers. “Since there might not be a leading trigger phrase that marks the beginning of a voice command.”
There seems to be some progress being made by other researchers. One group developed a system that more accurately detects wake words, while another basically trained AI models to better understand rare words – a problem that Siri and its infamous “I’m not sure I understand” phrase are quite guilty of (and the source of frustration with many users).
Apple seems to be doing a lot of work to improve Siri. The company recently developed a system called STEER (or Semantic Turn Extension-Expansion Recognition) that tries to improve your back-and-forth communication with an AI assistant by training it to understand when you’re asking a follow-up question and when you’re asking a new one. Essentially, this will make your conversations with the AI assistant feel more organic.
AI technology has developed quite rapidly over the past few years and models like Siri seem perfectly capable of evolving to these heights. Whether this arrives in the next iPhone or not is anyone’s guess but we probably won’t be waiting too long.
Source: The Verge
