Apple is reportedly investing millions of dollars a day into building artificial intelligence, and one of the benefactors is Siri, its AI assistant, which has been criticised for its limited purpose, but it could be in for some handy new features next year.
Apple’s conversational AI unit, known as “Foundational Models,” is led by John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI, who was hired in 2018 to work on Siri. The team has approximately 16 members, which include a few former Google engineers. One of many projects includes a new feature for the iPhone that would let users automate tasks involving multiple steps using voice commands, according to the Information.
One use case that the report explains is that users can tell Siri on their phone to create a GIF using the last five photos they have taken and send it to a friend without manually programming each action. So, from the sound of it, the feature could be very similar to the Shortcuts, which was introduced in iOS 12, but it would be integrated into Siri.
Earlier, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had reported that Apple has been developing its language model, Ajax, which could power Siri in the coming version of iOS. The Ajax is said to be a transformer language model, similar to that of OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Lamda, which can summarise text and answer questions based on the data it has been fed. Gurman notes that several Siri engineers have been toying around with the language model.
Siri has been long disaproved of for being slow to adapt to new technology, which a former Apple engineer, John Burkey, attributes to “technological hurdles” and “clunky code.” Siri’s database includes an extensive collection of phrases in roughly 20 languages, and even minor updates, like adding new phrases, require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks.
Well, Siri could gain some smarts as soon as next year. According to the report, Apple plans to release the new Siri features as a part of the iOS update in the coming year. This implies that the new Siri capabilities could be included in iOS 18.
Aside from efforts to make Siri smarter, Apple also has teams working on other artificial intelligence projects. One team is said to be developing a multimodal AI model that will be able to create text, images, and videos.
Apple’s conversational AI unit, known as “Foundational Models,” is led by John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI, who was hired in 2018 to work on Siri. The team has approximately 16 members, which include a few former Google engineers. One of many projects includes a new feature for the iPhone that would let users automate tasks involving multiple steps using voice commands, according to the Information.
One use case that the report explains is that users can tell Siri on their phone to create a GIF using the last five photos they have taken and send it to a friend without manually programming each action. So, from the sound of it, the feature could be very similar to the Shortcuts, which was introduced in iOS 12, but it would be integrated into Siri.
Earlier, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had reported that Apple has been developing its language model, Ajax, which could power Siri in the coming version of iOS. The Ajax is said to be a transformer language model, similar to that of OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Lamda, which can summarise text and answer questions based on the data it has been fed. Gurman notes that several Siri engineers have been toying around with the language model.
Siri has been long disaproved of for being slow to adapt to new technology, which a former Apple engineer, John Burkey, attributes to “technological hurdles” and “clunky code.” Siri’s database includes an extensive collection of phrases in roughly 20 languages, and even minor updates, like adding new phrases, require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks.
Well, Siri could gain some smarts as soon as next year. According to the report, Apple plans to release the new Siri features as a part of the iOS update in the coming year. This implies that the new Siri capabilities could be included in iOS 18.
Aside from efforts to make Siri smarter, Apple also has teams working on other artificial intelligence projects. One team is said to be developing a multimodal AI model that will be able to create text, images, and videos.
