If you’ve ever used a digital assistant on a smartphone, like Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, or Alexa, you know that there will be a trigger word that you have to say to activate it. In the case of Apple’s Siri, it’s “Hey Siri” as its trigger word, but how did Apple land up on that particular phrase?According to Apple’s latest report on machine learning, the company explained why they chose that phrasing to be the one to activate Siri. “The phrase ‘Hey Siri’ was originally chosen to be as natural as possible; in fact, it was so natural that even before this feature was introduced, users would invoke Siri using the home button and inadvertently prepend their requests with the words, ‘Hey Siri.’ Its brevity and ease of articulation, however, bring to bear additional challenges.”
Apple goes on to detail how they went about solving problems like accidental activations, and how they programmed it so that the iPhone’s speakers are able to pick up the activation words. That being said while it is an interesting look into the development of Siri, Apple does have a problem in which for the most part, it seems that Siri isn’t quite as capable compared to other assistants like Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa.
There have been rumors that Apple is looking for ways to improve on Siri and recent job listings have indicated as much. One particular rumor even claims that Apple could be looking to revamp its digital assistant.