In a world where artificially intelligent digital assistants are making a big splash, Apple’s Siri is predominantly seen as not being able to make the grade and compete with other assistants that are starting to appear. News is coming in that Apple is fully aware that Siri isn’t up to task, and is due for a significant upgrade. It is being suggested that the Cupertino-based company is about to provide Siri with a huge upgrade that will reportedly “wipe the floor” with competition thanks to the integration of a technology stack that it acquired last year as part of the purchase of a UK-based company called VocalIQ.
A number of sources who insist that they have intricate knowledge of the product that VocalIQ was working on prior to the Apple purchase are claiming that Apple deemed it to be so impressive in the current assistant landscape that it wanted to purchase and prevent it from actually being released into a standalone smartphone app. Those same sources are also suggesting that the new Apple assistant will be a lot more robust and more capable than the current competition, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now/Assistant.
One of the impressive aspects of this new so-called Siri upgrade is the fact that the VocalIQ team had extensively tested its own product against the major competitors using very human-like natural language conversational techniques. For those that like statistics and numbers, the VocalIQ product recorded a 90-percent success rate in understanding when asked a very human question like “Find me a local Italian restaurant that offers free Wi-Fi and disabled parking”.
In contrast, competitors like Siri, Google Now/Assistant, Alexa and Cortana were only able to understand and provide any real valid results approximately 20-percent of the time. That’s a huge increase and a big tick in the box for the tech which is about to be integrated into Siri.
The upgrade to Siri would fall in very nicely with additional speculation suggesting that Apple is working hard on a new wireless speaker product range that would compete with the likes of the Amazon Echo and the recently announced Google Home.
The whole point of this type of product is that it can be controlled seamlessly via voice commands, allowing users to not only do things like streaming music, but to also find information instantly about local amenities and the surrounding area. An upgraded Siri with additional power and natural language processing capabilities would tie in perfectly with that product.
(Source: Tech Insider)
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