Apple wants to make the most of telephony technology and digital assistants!
Siri does a lot of good things for us, but Apple thinks it can do a lot more. According a patent filed under the name “Telephony digital assistant integration”Apple wants to promote the integration of Siri in our daily lives, especially in activities such as answer or make calls, ask questions in the middle of a conversation and even take reservations for us.
According to the documents, the idea is to provide regular access to Siri where it currently does not. In particular, the integration of telephony and PDA technology has not been fully exploited.
Siri will be able to answer calls like us, maybe better
One of the examples that the patent takes into account refers to the possibility of Siri filtering calls for us.
For example, conventional digital assistants are not capable of handling incoming and outgoing calls on behalf of users, let alone facilitating calls in progress. Given the speech-based nature of both PDA technology and telephony, an improved system for integrating PDAs with telephony is desired.
What the patent proposes is that the virtual assistant has the ability to assign trust levels to usersdepending on the frequency of communication and making decisions such as answering calls immediately, putting them on hold, or allowing themselves to issue messages such as “you’re in a meeting” or “you’re in a job interview” .
To achieve this, Apple offers to take advantage of alternatives such as voice identification and voice recognition are used to determine the identity of the caller.
As always, Apple follows up on a comment like this with plenty of privacy details:
The generation and storage of voiceprints may require the prior approval of the person corresponding to the respective voiceprint in order to use said voiceprints.
The patent extends to common situations such as ask questions to an unknown contact and depending on the answers communicate or not with the user. But it can also go further, in particular to know if the caller is a real person or another Siri trying to call us.
In this example, the query may include a nonsensical or illogical question, such that a human user would respond with a predictable response and/or response pattern, such as a pause followed by a clarifying question (e.g., ” What do you mean??’, ‘Excuse me?’, etc.).
Apple’s patent diagrams include reservation of a table in a restaurant. It’s not a big leap to imagine being able to say “Hey Siri, save me a table for two at the nearest pizzeria on Tuesday night”.
Scheme for using Siri in the future
Assuming your Siri reaches the Siri at the pizzeria, the restaurant might offer a reservation for 7 p.m. and accept it on your behalf.
Although the patents do not guarantee the arrival of the technology, in this case and taking into account the evolution of Siri since its launch until the novelties presented in iOS 16 it seems likely that this will be a project we can see in action, in the future.
