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

Amazingly

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Throwing people at the problem won't work. Siri can't even understand follow up questions like: "Who is the President of the US?" followed by "How old is he?". So much for "AI". It isn't even a very good Eliza.