Siri

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a message for Wall Street. He believes Apple “break new ground” on generative AI this year. Cook’s latest AI hype comments came today during Apple’s annual shareholders meeting.

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 …

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.

A leaker with a mixed track-record says that Apple will use this year’s WWDC to announce some new Siri generative AI capabilities.

The post is vague, stating only that it will “add more personalization and natural conversations to Siri,” with just a few other elements …

What’s “one perk of fame,” according to Barbra Streisand? Phoning up the CEO of Apple when Siri doesn’t pronounce your name correctly.

Since the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, many people have wondered when Apple will introduce its own generative AI. Rumors suggest that this could happen next year. Until then, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been talking a lot about AI in recent months and has now reinforced that Apple is investing in generative AI.

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 …

Ace reporter Wayne Ma has a new scoop about a feature likely coming to Siri in iOS 18. The upcoming feature is revealed in a new report that details Apple’s ongoing efforts to invest in conversational AI.

In what appears to be a new feature in the latest iOS beta, Siri explains Conversation Awareness the first time it is activated.

Without the message, people might be confused as to why the volume has suddenly reduced itself on their Airpods Pro 2 …

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 …

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.

In July, we heard from Mark Gurman that Apple is internally testing a generative AI chatbot and that the company may make a “significant AI-related announcement” in 2024. Now, the latest analyst note from Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that generative AI features may not come to Apple hardware for consumers next year.

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.

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 …

This week, Apple released the third beta of iOS 17 to developers, and while the update doesn’t add any major features compared to previous betas, it does come with some minor changes. One of those is the addition of new voice options for Siri in German.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

Back in 2020, Apple launched its handy intercom feature for HomePod and HomePod mini. Fast forward to 2023 and that feature isn’t yet native on Sonos speakers. Now Soro For Sonos has received an update that brings intercom capability and more.