Without making too much noise or drawing too much attention, Apple is constantly evolving Siri. It may be in its ability to respond to certain requests, the ability to use the assistant while our devices are offline or simply to make the responses to our request faster.
In iOS 17, Apple includes an improvement, a small change that could easily have gone unnoticed, but has huge potential to make a big difference in how we use Siri on our devices. For the first time, Siri can now understand bilingual queries.
Translation, more complex requests and a more personal assistant
The change first caught the attention of TechCrunch, which reported that Siri has gained the ability to process and respond to queries in two languages. Initially, this will be limited to some combinations of Indian and English languages, such as Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Kannada or Marathi. However, it is expected that this feature will be extended to other language pairs in the future.
In an increasingly globalized and multilingual age, Siri’s ability to understand and respond to bilingual queries is a significant advance in both capabilities and convenience. We’re not just talking about integration into the everyday lives of bilingual people, but about Siri being able to understand us better in a number of practical cases.
Right now, if a person asked Siri “How do you say ‘where is Apple Park’ in English”, the assistant would do the same and respond. The difficulty comes when the speaker in question answers in English and the person has the need to ask Siri “What does ‘just turn right on the next one’ mean in Spanish.” Here, right now, there is no answer.
It is true that we could go to the Translate app for these uses, but often an interaction with Siri is much simpler and faster. Now, when we can make bilingual requests in English and Spanish, we will be able to use Siri to have a conversation with another person in another language in the most intuitive way possible.
In addition to the benefits for translations just mentioned, the change may also make it easier for Siri users to use words or phrases in other languages while speaking in our primary language. More and more English words or phrases are getting mixed in with regular communication. Right now, Siri tries to assimilate words in other languages into the main language, which does not give the results we would expect.
The truth is that, even if it starts with only Indic languages, the potential of this small change is more than considerable. And one that shows the enormous engineering work behind Siri. To date, the vast majority of voice assistants have limited users to a single language at a time, one that is set up once and no longer changed, but being able to switch between more than one, even for work and personal purposes, is something to consider.
A small change that has great potential to make Apple’s voice assistant more useful, accessible and versatile for millions of users, bilingual or not, around the world. And excellent news to see how Apple continues to progressively improve Siri and adapt its underlying technology to the complexities and realities of the day-to-day realities in which we use it. And we say that, it is worth remembering, based on a beta, that of iOS 17, which still has a long way to go until its release in autumn along with the iPhone 15. We’ll see what else Apple can surprise us with.
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