Siri is the name of Apple’s personal digital assistant. It is basically voice control that talks back to you, that understands relationships and context, handle basic sequential inference, and has a personality straight out of Pixar.
Siri is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.’s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, and tvOS operating systems. The assistant uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Internet services. The software adapts to users' individual language usages, searches, and preferences, with continuing use. Returned results are individualized. Siri is a spin-off from a project originally developed by the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. Its speech recognition engine was provided by Nuance Communications, and Siri uses advanced machine learning technologies to function. Its original American, British, and Australian voice actors recorded their respective voices around 2005, unaware of recordings' eventual usage in Siri. The voice assistant was released as an app for iOS in February 2010, and it was acquired by Apple two months later. Siri was then integrated into iPhone 4S at its release in October 2011. At that time, the separate app was also removed from the iOS App Store. Siri has since become an integral part of Apple’s products, having been adapted into other hardware devices over the years, including newer iPhone models, as well as iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, AirPods, Apple TV, and HomePod.
Siri supports a wide range of user commands, including performing phone actions, checking basic information, scheduling events and reminders, handling device settings, searching the Internet, navigating areas, finding information on entertainment, and is able to engage with iOS-integrated apps. With the release of iOS 10 in 2016, Apple opened up limited third-party access to Siri, including third-party messaging apps, as well as payments, ride-sharing, and Internet calling apps. With the release of iOS 11, Apple updated Siri’s voices for more clear, human voices, started supporting follow-up questions and language translation, and additional third-party actions. Siri’s original release on iPhone 4S in 2011 received mixed reviews. It received praise for its voice recognition and contextual knowledge of user information, including calendar appointments, but was criticized for requiring stiff user commands and having a lack of flexibility. It was also criticized for lacking information on certain nearby places, and for its inability to understand certain English accents. In 2016 and 2017, several media reports said that Siri lacked innovation, particularly against new competing voice assistants. The reports concerned Siri’s limited set of features, “bad” voice recognition, and undeveloped service integrations as causing trouble for Apple in the field of artificial intelligence and cloud-based services; the basis for the complaints reportedly due to stifled development, as caused by Apple’s prioritization of user privacy and executive power struggles within the company.
Development
Siri is a spin-out from the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center, and is an offshoot of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA)-funded CALO project. It was co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, and UCLA alumnus Adam Cheyer. Kittlaus named Siri after a co-worker in Norway, and it means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian. Siri’s speech recognition engine was provided by Nuance Communications, a speech technology company. This was acknowledged by neither Apple nor Nuance for years, until Nuance CEO Paul Ricci confirmed the information at a 2011 technology conference. The speech recognition system makes use of sophisticated machine learning techniques, including convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory. The initial Siri prototype was implemented using the Active platform, a joint project between the Artificial Intelligence of SRI International and the Vrai Group at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The Active platform was the focus of a Ph.D. thesis led by Didier Guzzoni, who joined Siri as its chief scientist. Siri was acquired by Apple Inc. in April 2010 under the direction of Steve Jobs. Apple’s first notion of a digital personal assistant was originally a concept video in 1987, called the Knowledge Navigator.
Features
Apple offers a wide range of voice commands to interact with Siri, including, but not limited to:
- Phone and Text actions, such as “Call Sarah”, “Read my new messages”, “Set the timer for 10 minutes”, and “Send email to mom”.
- Check basic information, including “What’s the weather like today?” and “How many dollars are in a euro?”
- Schedule events and reminders, including “Schedule a meeting” and “Remind me to …”
- Handle device settings, such as “Take a picture”, “Turn off Wi-Fi”, and “Increase the brightness”.
- Search the Internet, including “Define …”, “Find pictures of …”, and “Search Twitter for …”
- Navigation, including “Take me home”, “What’s traffic like on the way home?”, and “Find driving directions to …”
- Translate words and phrases from English to a few languages, such as “How do I say where is the nearest hotel in French?”
- Entertainment, such as “What basketball games are on today?”, “What are some movies playing near me?”, and “What’s the synopsis of …?”
- Engage with iOS-integrated apps, including “Pause Apple Music” and “Like this song”.
- Handle payments through Apple Pay, such as “Apple Pay 25 dollars to Mike for concert tickets” or “Send 41 dollars to Ivana.” In September 2014, Apple added the ability for users to speak “Hey Siri” to enable the assistant without the requirement of physically handling the device. In September 2015, the “Hey Siri” feature was updated to include individualized voice recognition, a presumed effort to prevent non-owner activation. With the announcement of iOS 10 in June 2016, Apple opened up limited third-party developer access to Siri through a dedicated application programming interface (API). The API restricts usage of Siri to engaging with third-party messaging apps, payment apps, ride-sharing apps, and Internet calling apps.
Perceived lack of innovation “… perhaps the biggest disappointment among Apple’s cloud-based services is the one it needs most today, right now: Siri. Before Apple bought it, Siri was on the road to being a robust digital assistant that could do many things and integrate with many services—even though it was being built by a startup with limited funds and people. After Apple bought Siri, the giant company seemed to treat it as a backwater, restricting it to doing only a few, slowly increasing a number of tasks, like telling you the weather, sports scores, movie and restaurant listings, and controlling the device’s functions. Its unhappy founders have left Apple to build a new AI service called viva, and, on too many occasions, Siri either gets things wrong, does not know the answer, or can’t verbalize it. Instead, it shows you a web search result, even when you’re not in a position to read it.”