Apple is working on generative AI concepts that could be intended to improve Siri. Apparently, the company has been developing a large language model and other AI tools that were reported at the AI meeting held for Apple employees last month.
This is what they pick up in the New York Times, as, in fact, Apple engineers, including members of the Siri team, have been testing new language generation concepts “every week” in response to the growing popularity of chatbots like ChatGPT.
A model like ChatGPT that can be a game changer, and a big one at that
The popularity and quality of models like ChatGPT has quickly highlighted how the personal assistants on our phones, whether we’re talking about Alexa, Siri or Google Asistant, are not becoming all they could be. Their understanding of what we ask of them could improve and the quality of responses could improve as well.
In fact, the NYT reports that Siri has faced multiple obstacles on its path to improvement. Apparently, Siri’s base design makes it very difficult for engineers to add new features. For example, Siri’s database contains a large list of phrases in nearly two dozen languages, making it so that adding just one has the effect of generating “a big snowball”. So says John Burkey, who worked with Siri in 2014, and further comments that, by design, “it took weeks for the code to be updated with the basic features.”
Much has happened since 2014 and we know, as Apple has communicated, that Siri has been completely rewritten several times. Apple has even managed to get the model itself to cabaret and run locally on an iPhone, which is already all in achievement. In this regard, we are completely unaware of how its internal structure has progressed since Burkey worked on it in 2014, but all indications are that an evolution is in the works.
While telling us how much better the AirPods Pro 2 are in this announcement, the news that Apple is working on an AI like ChatGPT, similar to the one that at some point we will no longer have to say “Hey Siri”, shows how the company is willing to continue investing in the technologies we use in our day to day. A NYT report that could well translate into a surprise or two during the developers conference next June. We will be on the lookout for news.
