Siris

Siri is Apple's most public AI tool for now. Maria Diaz/ZDNETBilingual families are very common in the US, where about 20% of families speak more than one language at home. My husband and I are native Spanish speakers, and our three children are all native English speakers and active Spanish deniers. Two languages make texting in Spanglish inevitable, but Siri is finally catching up with iOS 17.4.The latest iOS update allows Siri to read your messages in any supported language. Imagine you and your best friend text in…

Image: Apple/GettyI want to love Siri. I really do. Every day, I walk around with a little robot that lives in my pocket and responds to simple commands. It is a full-blown miracle, the kind of thing our ancestors could only dream of. The problem is Siri’s an idiot. My digital assistant and others like it from Google and Amazon are close to useless for anything more sophisticated than checking the weather. In 2024, that’s going to change. Thanks to AI, Siri is about to get a whole lot smarter, and in small but meaningful…

Photo: Victoria Song / GizmodoAI assistants were made for humans to bark orders at, so Apple is reportedly working to eliminate the “hey” from “hey, Siri.” The idea is to make it faster to command the digital assistant on compatible devices like the iPhone, iPad, and HomePod smart speakers, especially if you need to make multiple commands in a row.The report comes via Bloomberg, specificallyMark Gurman’s weekly Power On newsletter. While Gurman is usually on the mark with what’s next from Apple, the company isn’t…

Apple is working to simplify how users interact with Siri, according to . The company has reportedly spent the past few months training the digital assistant to respond to “Siri” instead of “Hey Siri.” On the surface, that’s a simple change, but one that Gurman says involves a “significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work.” The reason for that is that a two-word trigger phrase like “Hey Siri” increases the likelihood of the software responding to a request. The change would make it easier to string…

Oscar Wong/Getty ImagesSiri and I have a love-hate relationship. We get along sometimes, until it decides to have a mind of its own and show me it really never deserved my trust. I joke, of course. But changing Siri's voice can make the virtual assistant more palatable, not to mention more amusing.Admittedly, Siri's come a long way to become a somewhat reliable voice assistant. Asking it to do things works over half the time now, and it's always fun to try. But changing Siri's voice goes beyond giving it a fun, new…

When Siri first launched on the iPhone 4s, Apple’s virtual assistant didn’t sound all that human. However, with recent iterations of iPhone, Siri sounds much more natural with more diversity not only in the voice itself, but the tone and even regional dialects. It makes using Apple’s hands-free “Hey Siri” tech much more natural, like you’re conversing with a person and not a robot. While the accent will still default to the region you’re in, you’re free to change both the accent and gender of Siri’s voice on your…