One of the problems with most digital assistants these days is that they require an internet connection to work. This is because a lot of the processing is done on remote servers (which also explains why our digital assistants are as responsive like what we see in the movies), which means that an internet connection is required.
We imagine that being able to process requests locally will make things a lot faster, and apparently this is something that Apple is looking at. Thanks to a recently discovered patent, it appears that Apple is looking into possibly creating a version of Siri that could work without the need for an internet connection.
What this means is that in events that you don’t have internet, you could still use Siri for certain tasks, such as speech-to-text. However in the patent, Apple notes that this could be rather complex due to the requirement for a bunch of hardware needed to make it happen. For example it would need different modules for processing dialog, speech synthesis, phonetic alphabet conversion, and more.
Like we said, we imagine that a version of Siri that could work offline or process commands locally would be a lot faster than having to send information back to a server, and waiting for a response. It would also make it a lot more useful, although whether or not Apple will actually create an offline Siri remains to be seen.