- A report from Bloomberg suggests Apple could change the trigger phrase for Siri on its devices.
- The change has been made to simplify the digital assistant’s responsiveness.
- It also means that many months have been spent on AI training to make this simple change.
It has become a bit of a meme now that Siri is always listening to you if you own an Apple device.
There is indeed some merit to this meme, with Apple being forced to suspend its audio scrubbing of Siri recordings, as well as given device owners the ability to choose whether the digital assistant is in operation or not.
Now a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that a significant change is coming to Siri. To that end, Gurman notes that Apple has spent the past few months training Siri to respond to a more simple trigger phrase.
Here, instead of the usual “Hey Siri” phrase used to bring up the digital assistant, you could soon just say “Siri”. This might not sound like a substantial change on the face of it, but as Gurman explains, quite a bit of AI training has gone into making the digital assistant more responsive.
The reason for the change is believed to be twofold, according to Gurman. The first is that Siri lags slightly behind the offerings of its rivals – namely Amazon with Alexa and Google which has its Assistant. While both options respond to a phrase prefixed with “Hey”, they also respond to other phrases. As such, Apple needs to play catch up in that regard.
The other reason is that a more simple trigger phrase opens up the opportunity to string together more complex requests or queries of the Apple digital assistant.
The Cupertino-based company is yet to officially comment on the report, but Gurman says the reworked version of Siri will see the light of day in 2024. No precise date is mentioned, but the next WWDC developer conference seems like as good a place as many to make such an announcement.
With Siri set to become more responsive in future, Apple device owners will indeed need to be careful about what they say around the digital assistant.
[Image – Photo by Omid Armin on Unsplash]
