Malcolm Owen
Leaked documents relating to Siri reveal upgrades to the digital assistant are coming in late 2021, aimed at supporting a new piece of hardware.
A list of Siri upgrades expected to arrive before "fall 2021" includes expected elements for "new hardware support" for a "new device," though a report published on Friday is light on those details. Codenamed "Yukon," the upgrades to Siri will introduce support for Find my Friends to the voice-based service, the documents claim. Siri will also include support for accessing the App Store, though the capabilities relating to that are not advised by a report.
Built-in machine translation could enable language interpreting capabilities within Siri, without needing a cellular or other network connection at all, a feature that could be handy for travelers.
A large section of the internal documents, provided to The Guardian by a former Siri "grader," mentions how Siri could work with other devices in a variety of ways. At its simplest, features to enable Siri to read out message notifications to users wearing AirPods is suggested, while the ability to use Shazam via Siri on Apple Watch is also touted.
A bigger feature could be commanding Siri on one device to perform actions on another. One example given is to "Play Taylor Swift on my HomePod," which could be said on an Apple Watch or iPhone remotely and interpreted to control the user's smart speaker at home.
Arguably the biggest element is the ability to "have a back-and-forth conversation about health problems" with Siri. While this could take the form of Siri providing a basic diagnosis of the user to see if medical treatment is worth attaining, it is also possible that the conversations could form part of HealthKit or ResearchKit, Apple's initiatives in the medical field.
Despite the lack of information relating to what kind of new Siri-equipped devices are on the way, one of the most likely candidates is the HomePod, which is enjoying success in reaching markets like China where rival systems from Google and Amazon aren't available. It is plausible that Apple could produce a "mini" version of the HomePod, offering consumers a cheaper and smaller version in a similar vein to the Google Home Mini and the Amazon Echo Dot.
Apple has been rumored to be working on a new generation of the audio device for some time, with a cheaper variant also predicted by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in April 2018, though such a model has yet to be launched.
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33 Comments
Apple canceled AirPower wireless charger after it was announced.
There is much unknown for a device which yet to be announced and appear in about 2 years.
And I am sure Apple works and tries even more technologies and devices. And we could speculate ton of time about hypothetical devices. And how many of these devices will actually see the day of light?
The entire Guardian article is worth reading as it has far more to say than "a new device might be coming in 2021".
In fact that was more an afterthought mentioned in the last paragraphs and not the focus or even a leading reason the Guardian reported the story.
-Siri training for touchy subjects.
-Sources of the audio recordings include Airpods, Carplay, iPads, and AppleTV in addition to two other unmentioned devices tho the iPhone would be almost certainly be one of those and Homepod the other.
-Siri grading screenshots? The Guardian has them ( "...50 screenshots of Siri requests and their automatically-produced transcripts, including personally identifiable information...") and may or may not be shown as some point, but the ability to publish them certainly limited by the EU's privacy guidelines. I'd lean to heavily redacted if published at all.
- There's more to "Siri Grading" than simply transcribing some Siri recordings. Crafting Siri replies is one of them.
The AI article has the link to the original Guardian report this one was based on (highlighted in blue) but for those who don't see it:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/06/apple-rewrote-siri-to-deflect-questions-about-feminism
Apple really needs to improve Siri’s functionality first. Every time I ask her something the main answer I get is “I found this on the web for...”
if i ask her to turn on an alarm, she makes a new one rather then activating one I already have so I have to manually go delete all the extra alarms later. When I ask her to add a reminder to a list I never know which list it will end up on. The list goes on. Her voice recognition is quite good. Language interpretation not so much.