Apple's Siri & rivals being hampered by poor microphone tech

Apple's Siri — and other voice assistants from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — are being held back by the state microphone hardware, a report noted on Thursday.

Since the launch of the iPhone 5 in 2012, microphone technology hasn't advanced significantly, IHS Markit analyst Marwan Boustany explained to Bloomberg. As a result, mics still have difficulty picking up distant voices and filtering out background sounds. Even without these issues, keeping a mic on all the time — needed for voice triggers like "Hey Siri" — can sometimes consume too much battery life.

Companies like Apple are said to be looking for better mics from suppliers to fix these problems, as well as achieve a higher acoustic overload point less likely to be tripped. At the same time, size and power consumption need to be kept under control.

Partly to compensate for poor pickup, device makers have gradually been adding more microphones in recent years. While the first iPhone had a single mic, there are three in the iPhone 6, and four in the iPhone 6s. The Amazon Echo has seven, being a device that needs to hear users from anywhere in a room.

Some possible solutions may include mics with built-in audio processing algorithms, or ones using piezoelectric technology.

Microphones could become extremely important to Apple if the company is indeed developing an Echo competitor, whether in the form of a standalone product or an upgraded Apple TV. It's unknown how many mics the "iPhone 7" might be equipped with.

38 Comments

volcan 1799 comments · 10 Years

About 8 years ago

Although there are multiple mics, I'm pretty sure Siri only uses one of them.

Soli 9981 comments · 9 Years

I believe it. Amazon Echo is amazing with what it accurately understands, and I really don't think Amazon's speech-to-text technology is better than Apple's.

staticx57 405 comments · 10 Years

This is one of the few areas where Nokia was ahead pre-Microsoft. They had tech in the mic hardware that allowed for an extreme dynamic range, some thing that very few devices have these days. An example of this device would be thr Pureview 808 and Lumia 1020. It allowed for you to be at the front stage of a large concert and the loudest sounds would be as clear as the softest sounds without clipping. Something phones, including Apple and Samsung, still get wrong today. Imagine a few more years of development especially without Microsoft.

Soli said:

I believe it. Amazon Echo is amazing with what it accurately understands, and I really don't think Amazon's speech-to-text technology is better than Apple's.

I rarely have any trouble with Siri parsing the words. I can tell because it gets printed to the screen very accurately. The trouble usually happens after that text is analyzed by the server where the actual intent is often completely misunderstood. I've never tried Echo but I find Google is much better than Siri at returning the desired result. I always give Siri the first crack because it is just a home button hold, but more often than not I end up launching Google, because much of the time Siri just can't deliver. Siri is excellent at some things though - setting calendars, reminders, alarms, call, texting and surprisingly getting accurate up to the minute sports scores.

whatthewha 14 comments · 9 Years

"Hey Siri" on my iPad pro 9.7 is pretty bad. I literally have to shout at it from about 2 inches away most of the time or the room has to be dead silent. Now i just use it to piss off my wife. That's basically the only negative thing about my ipad.