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Siri

Siri does more than ever. Even before you ask.

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Siri is Apple’s personal assistant technology that debuted in 2011 with the iPhone 4S. Apple purchased Siri in 2010. At the time, it was a dedicated app on the iPhone. When it became built into the iPhone, it could do basic things like play music and make phone calls.

Now, it can do things like integrate with third-party messaging apps. payments, ride-sharing service, calling app, set timers, get directions, add reminders, start TV shows on the Apple TV, make language translations, search for photos, open documents, interact with your smart home though HomeKit, and a lot more.

In iOS 12, it became integrated into more third-party apps through Shortcuts. Companies can build their own interactions for the service to work with.

Compatible Devices

iPhone

iPad

Siri Remote for Apple TV

AirPods

HomePod

Apple Watch

Car Play

Apple teaching an AI system to make sense of app screens – could power advanced Siri

Ferret-UI could power advanced Siri | Concept image of Siri logo in thought bubble

An Apple research paper describes how the company has been developing Ferret-UI, a generative AI system specifically designed to be able to make sense of app screens.

The paper is somewhat vague about the potential applications of this – likely deliberately so – but the most exciting possibility would be to power a much more advanced Siri

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Siri in iOS 18: An AI revolution, or a sometimes useful dumpster fire?

Siri launched with the iPhone 4S in October 2011, replacing Voice Control with a more capable virtual assistant. A dozen years later, Siri has evolved into the primary way we interact with our Apple products.

Wait, no, I’m being told Siri sounds more natural but the core technology is roughly the same. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence now means generative AI and chat bots are based on large language models.

Siri and the rest of iOS 18 will join the AI revolution in June, ending our long national nightmare of Siri being somewhere between hot garbage and kinda useful sometimes. At least that’s what’s being reported, but we don’t really have a great sense of what to expect yet.

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Next generation Siri likely to be launched in iOS 18, with ChatGPT style capabilities

Next generation Siri | Shown in use on iPhone

A next generation Siri version is set to be powered by a generative AI chatbot, with analysts expecting it to be launched with iOS 18, and announced at this year’s WWDC.

While Apple has been criticized for the way that Siri has lagged behind, a new report says that this is because the company is aiming to be far more ambitious than existing generative AI systems …

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Apple closing Siri data operations office in San Diego, impacting 121 employees

Via Bloomberg, Apple is closing an office in San Diego, which housed part of the Data Operations Annotations group, which evaluates Siri customer responses and helps improve accuracy of the system, among other duties.

The reorganization impacts 121 jobs in San Diego. Apple has offered all affected employees jobs at its Austin, Texas, offices if they are willing to relocate.

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Feature request: Let me snapshot my smart home to auto-create a scene

Snapshot my smart home | Contemporary home at dusk

The vast majority of my smart home control comprises asking Siri to activate a scene – or having one automatically triggered by a time or event. For example, when going to bed, a single command switches on low lighting in the bedroom while switching off all other lights in the home.

Most of these scenes are created from scratch, thinking about exactly what I want to happen in particular circumstances – but there’s another approach I’d like to be able to take …

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Voice Control more important than Siri, yet has fallen behind, say disabled people

Voice Control problems | Settings screen shown

Disabled people who rely on Apple’s accessibility features say that Voice Control has fallen behind Siri in both accuracy and capabilities, despite being an essential rather than a nice-to-have.

They say it’s frustrating to see the Cupertino company continue to make improvements to Siri, while Voice Control – which is key to many disabled people being able to use Apple tech – has apparently been forgotten …

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Microsoft is shutting down Cortana, and Apple should do the same with Siri

Microsoft Cortana

Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant, which was introduced in 2014 back when Windows Phone was still a thing. Similar to Siri, Cortana lets users perform a number of tasks using voice commands. But it seems Microsoft is giving up on its old virtual assistant, as the latest Windows 11 update kills the Cortana app. The reason? The company will now bet on AI instead.

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tvOS 16.6 officially adds Siri support in Hebrew for Apple TV and HomePod

Siri HomePod

Earlier this year, it was reported that Apple had been internally testing Siri support in Hebrew for the HomePod with iOS 16.4 – and there was even a video of the new language in action on a HomePod mini running an internal beta build. Now with iOS 16.6 and tvOS 16.6, Apple is officially rolling out Siri in Hebrew for both HomePod and Apple TV.

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Apple GPT won’t be a customer feature anytime soon [Opinion]

Apple GPT won't be a customer tool anytime soon | Cute robot image

News that Apple has developed its own generative AI model – dubbed Apple GPT – caused a little flurry of excitement yesterday, with John Gruber noting that it caused AAPL’s stock price to briefly spike by 2.7%

Even investors seemed to quickly realise that the news doesn’t mean much, however, as most of that gain was lost by the end of the day …

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iOS 17 lets users easily change the app used to send messages with Siri

iOS 17 lets users easily change the app used to send messages with Siri

It’s been a while since iOS users have been able to ask Siri to send a message to someone. And while this command uses iMessage or SMS by default, it also works if you specify a compatible third-party app. With iOS 17, Apple is making this even more intuitive with a new option that lets users change which app will be used to send a message through Siri.

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ChatGPT for iOS adds Siri & Shortcuts support, and proper iPad app – as it faces lawsuit

ChatGPT for iOS updated | iPhone with OpenAI logo

ChatGPT for iOS has been given an update, adding support for both Siri and Shortcuts. It also now allows drag-and-drop for the first time.

In other ChatGPT news, the unreliability of the AI’s output has been highlighted a number of times, including its propensity to make up citations – and that has now gotten the chatbot into legal trouble …

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Siri no longer requires ‘Hey’ command to activate, now has back-to-back requests

Hey Siri command HomePod

Since iPhone 6s, users can talk to Siri hands-free just by saying the command “Hey Siri.” This command was later added to pretty much every Apple device, and became crucial for HomePod – Apple’s smart speaker. But now with iOS 17, macOS 14, and other updates, users no longer need to say “Hey Siri” to talk to the viral assistant.

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Apple is looking for engineers to work with Generative AI in a mixed reality environment

Siri generative AI

Earlier this year, Apple added dozens of new jobs focused on engineers and scientists working with artificial intelligence. To spice things up further, the company recently added a new job opening to its website – this time specifically looking for software engineers with knowledge of generative AI and mixed reality environments.

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