Chance Miller
Apple is working on a big change to how its Siri voice assistant works.
While you currently have to say "Hey Siri" to activate the assistant
hands-free, that may not be the case for much longer. Bloomberg reports
today that Apple engineers are working to drop the "Hey" part of the phrase,
so you'd only have to say "Siri" followed by a command to activate the
assistant.
In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman
says that this is "a technical challenge that requires a significant amount
of AI training and underlying engineering work." Apple has reportedly been
working on this change for the last several months and hopes to roll it out
either next year or in 2024 depending on the progress of development and
testing.
As it stands today, Apple is testing this change with employees and is
collecting the necessary training data as part of that process. One of the
specific challenges is making sure Siri is able to understand the wake word
in multiple different accents and dialects.
Apple is also working to make improvements to other aspects of Siri,
including its integration into third-party applications and services. "It
will integrate the voice assistant deeper into third-party apps and services
and improve its ability to understand users and take the correct course of
action," Bloomberg says in today's report.
9to5Mac's Take
Apple's mission to change Siri's wake phrase from "Hey Siri" to just "Siri"
shouldn't come as a huge surprise. Doing so would match what's offered by
Amazon, where you simply have to say "Alexa" to trigger the assistant, not
"Hey Alexa." It would also give Apple a leg up on Google, where the wake
phrase is "Hey Google" or "OK Google."
But as today's report says, this isn't a small undertaking and there's a lot
of training and behind-the-scenes work that goes into a change like this.
For Apple, this is especially true as Siri is already prone to a number of
false positives particularly with activations of Siri on the HomePod.
Siri is Apple's personal assistant technology that debuted in 2011. It works
on iOS, macOS, tvOS, HomePod, CarPlay, and Apple Watch.
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