Today will be held the WWDC 2023, Apple’s annual event dedicated to developers and news of its operating systems. Among the possible surprises, there is the change of voice command to activate Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant: just call it by name, without using the command “Hey Siri”.
Apple says goodbye to the “Hey Siri” command
Second Mark Gurman at BloombergApple may abandon the classic “Hey Siri” and replace it with a simple “Siri”, as its competitors already do. This change would be in line with Apple’s plans to make Siri smarter and more capable of understand and respond to commands without needing a specific wake-up phrase.
Gurman had already anticipated this possibility last November, indicating 2023 or 2024 as probable years for the launch of the new feature. But if other functions, such as the “ChatGPT for Siri” which seems to be in development, are still far away, this novelty should arrive very soon.
This might seem like an insignificant detail, but it actually requires a lot of technical effort of artificial intelligence and engineering to make it happen.
The difficulty is getting Siri to recognize the single word “Siri” in various accents and dialects. Using two words – “Hey Siri” – increases the chances that the system understands the signal correctly. It should be emphasized that this change would make Siri much more like Amazon’s voice assistant, which is activated by just saying “Alexa“, for sure.
Gurman also revealed that Apple is working on one greater integration with third-party apps and services, to make Siri more effective and able to provide better assistance thanks to a larger context.
All news that we will be able to discover at today’s WWDC 2023, we will keep you updated.