Gurman revealed to us what could be one of the big new features of iOS 17: You would no longer need to say “Hey Siri” to use Apple’s virtual assistantbut simply “Siri”.
The company is working on an initiative to remove the “Hey” in the wake phrase so that a user only has to say “Siri,” with a command. While this may seem like a small change, making the change is a technical challenge that requires a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work.
The complexity means that Siri is able to understand the singular phrase “Siri” in several different accents and dialects. Having two words, “Hey Siri”, increases the likelihood that the system will pick up the signal correctly.
The change is not as simple as it sounds, as the chances of increased false positives with the use of a single word are very high. Amazon uses only one word, “Alexa”, it’s true, but it’s a word that in Spanish, for example, is much more difficult to confuse than “Siri”, which sounds a lot like one of the most used words in our language, “yes”.
In addition to this change, Gurman adds better integration with third-party apps, as well as other services. And it is that the arrival of Artificial Intelligence has left the virtual assistants a little “in the layers”, and if Siri was already behind the rest, now it looks like a bad joke
