Siri, the original voice assistant, has been a little quiet of late, overshadowed by the likes of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa and their assault on the smart speaker market.
Apple is set to change this, with the introduction of a new team. The team is a combination of the current Siri and the Core ML (machine learning) teams at Apple, and will go under the new guise of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team.
The head of this team is John Giannandrea, the former head of AI at Google.
Back in April, it was revealed that Giannandrea had joined Apple in an undisclosed role - it’s now known this role is of a similar ilk to what he was doing at Google, which was so important that it shifted Google’s motto of being 'search first' to 'AI first'.
Assisting the voice assistants
According to TechCrunch, the current teams won’t be restructured, but supervised by Giannandrea. In our view, having them under one umbrella will have nothing but positive implications for Siri, a voice service that is in need of a spruce.
The applications that Siri is now embedded in are vastly different to what it was originally built for, so we will no doubt see some big changes in the way Siri functions thanks to this move.
Combining the machine learning side of Apple with Siri is pretty much how Google Assistant matured into what it is today.
Apple has been on a hiring spree for Siri of late, so expect this to continue as well.
Via Engadget
