Apple Goes on Hiring Spree To Improve Siri's Smarts (engadget.com)

Thinknum has noticed that Apple has been on a Siri-related hiring spree in recent months, with 161 positions listed as of the end of March. There's been an uptick ever since summer 2016, but there was a distinct surge in February of this year. From a report: Nearly all of the new positions are for engineers, and it's notable that some of those spots are meant to tackle Siri's relative weakness in general questions. There are entries for Siri software engineers tackling "General Knowledge" and the "Knowledge Graph," for instance. Other notable recruiting efforts include a machine learning scientist as well as multiple engineers to address areas like Proactive Intelligence (Siri's ability to anticipate info you might need), the SiriKit developer framework and speech generation.

Comments

Re:Amazingly

[Dutch Gun]

I just tried that with Alexa, and it recognized the follow-up question. So, good for Amazon on that one. But Alexa still falls woefully short in other areas, though. For the shopping list functionality, you can't even say something simple like: "Alexa, add milk, eggs, and cheese to my shopping list."

Alexa: "I added "milk eggs cheese to your shopping list."

Me: "Alexa, remove "milk eggs cheese" from shopping list.

Alexa "You can remove items from the shopping list in the Alexa app."

*facepalm* This is why I have a good chuckle whenever someone calls these digital helpers "AI". Well, it's still early days, so these things will improve over time, presumably.