Credit: Unsplash
Siri will no longer need a “hey” to wake.
For as long as it has existed, Apple’s smart tech assistant program, Siri, has been activated the same way: “hey, Siri.” Since its first appearance on an iPhone, Siri has required that particular phrase in order to wake up and become receptive to further input. However, in the near future, it seems Apple is interested on paring down this already-short phrase to the bare minimum.
According to a Bloomberg report, Apple is looking to implement this change as soon as 2024. If Apple could make this change, it’d improve Siri’s convenience, bringing it more on par with Amazon’s Alexa assistant, which also requires nothing but its name to wake up. However, experts have noted that even dropping a single word from Siri’s activation will require an exponentially more advanced AI system.
“During the recognition phase, the system compares the voice command to the user-trained model,” Lian Jye Su, a research director at ABI Research, told Bloomberg. “‘Siri’ is much shorter than ‘Hey Siri,’ giving the system potentially less comparison points and higher error rate in an echo-y, large room and noisy environments.”
Tech industry analysts suspect that, if Apple were to undergo the kind of effort required to make this change, it probably wouldn’t be the only one. We could be do for a major upgrade or change to Siri’s capabilities.
Apple reportedly wants to swap the ‘Hey Siri’ trigger phrase for just ‘Siri’ https://t.co/V5qZlaM6nw pic.twitter.com/JGJV71PNMG
— The Verge (@verge) November 6, 2022
“While the ‘Hey Siri’ change requires a considerable amount of work, it would be surprising if Apple announced only this change to Siri,” James Sanders, a principal analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, also told Bloomberg. “Considering the rumored timing, I would anticipate this change to be bundled with other new or improved functionality for Siri, perhaps alongside a new model of HomePod and integrations with other smart home products via Matter, as a reintroduction to Apple’s voice assistant.”
