Apple is teasing a smarter Siri with a new voice to show off at June's WWDC
Apple is teasing a smarter Siri with a new voice to show
off at June's WWDC
Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY Published 7:14 p.m. ET May
21, 2018 | Updated 2:12 p.m. ET May 22, 2018
Apple is racing to become the first publicly traded stock
to attain a market value of $1 trillion. USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — For years, Apple has used the stage of its
Worldwide Developers Conference to announce upgrades to the Siri personal
assistant that would make it more useful.
This year's plan, according to a Siri trick Apple has put
out there: Siri will be smarter, get a new look and a new voice.
Ask Siri to tell you about the WWDC conference, which
starts June 4 in San Jose, and you get one of three answers both in audio and
written form.
—"I'm gonna have a shiny new home. Well, not really
shiny, more meshy and matte."
—"La, la, la, Siri is getting a brand new
voice."
—"I don't want to brag, but I'm getting a lot
smarter. It might be all that late-night studying I've been doing."
If readers feel like they've read this before, welcome to
the club. Apple's been saying similar stuff for years.
The WWDC is when Apple welcomes app developers to hear
about what's new with the iPhone maker, delivers previews of the IOS mobile operating
system update and hypes them on creating great apps to take advantage of the
new features.
What Apple promised about Siri at past WWDCs:
— 2013: Siri would get a new interface and a smoother
voice
—2014: Apple brought hands-free Siri operation to iPhones
and iPads (say "Hey, Siri" to wake it up)
—2015: A move to make Siri more "proactive" to
answer questions without excessive prompting.
—2016: Apple announced a new initiative that it promised
would really make Siri a more helpful tool — the ability to marry Siri with
third-party apps like Uber and Circle. At the time, Apple said opening Siri
outside of just Apple apps would make usage more widespread. But few app
developers signed on.
—2017: The HomePod, Apple's answer to Amazon Echo and Google
Home connected speakers, was introduced at WWDC, with Apple touting on-command
music selection via Siri and the Apple Music subscription service.
Apple had no comment on this year's plans.
The personal assistant was first introduced in October
2011 as a feature of the then-new iPhone 4S. Cutting edge at the start, in more
recent years its repeated stumbles have made it the frequent butt of late-night
comics' jokes. This bad rap has persisted even as Siri has become more useful
and smart — rivals like Google Assistant and Amazon's Echo seem to beat it in
the realm of understanding conversation and responding in kind.
It's the most widely used personal assistant, due to the
size of the billion-plus iPhone universe, but most studies show the Google
Assistant and Amazon Alexa to be smarter and more useful. In a recent USA TODAY
test, we asked the same 150 questions to Google, Alexa and Siri, and saw
accurate response rates of 80%, 78% and 55%, respectively.
At Google's I/O developer conference in May, the Internet
giant announced that several new voices would be forthcoming from the Google
Assistant over the summer, including the tones of singer John Legend.
Google also showed off a new use for a personal assistant
— making phone calls to set up appointments at hair salons and restaurants
directly from the Google Assistant app. Siri is still struggling to answer more
questions verbally, without having to say, "This is what I found on the
Web."
Perhaps Siri will have some real new skills this year?
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