“Apple appears to be focusing in a big way on Siri, evidenced by a major hiring spree aimed at enhancing its oft–criticized digital assistant,” Trevor Mogg reports for Digital Trends.
“According to data-tracker firm Thinknum, the tech giant has recently ramped up efforts to expand its team of Siri engineers, culminating in a posting one day last week that listed 161 Siri-related positions,” Mogg reports. “Siri’s limited skill set — especially when compared to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant — and occasional inability to understand spoken instructions has left some users frustrated, an annoyance brought to the fore with the recently launched HomePod, which places Siri front and center. Apple clearly hopes to fix all that with an injection of new engineers.”
Mogg reports, “News of Apple’s hiring spree comes just weeks after Forbes reported on how Amazon is hiring a whopping 1,147 people to work on Alexa, ‘more than Google is hiring for product and technical roles across the entire Alphabet conglomerate, including YouTube, Waymo, Google Fiber, and — of course — the main money maker in the Alphabet empire: the original Google.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: May concrete improvements come to Siri ASAP!
SEE ALSO:
Siri’s co-creator hits back at claims Siri was broken from launch – March 16, 2018
Former Apple employees reflect on Siri’s ‘squandered lead’ over Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant – March 14, 2018
Siri creator Dag Kittlaus diagnosed with same rare type of pancreatic cancer Steve Jobs had – January 12, 2017
Siri co-founder Kittlaus amicably departs Apple – October 24, 2011
Apple to Maps manager Williamson: Get lost – November 27, 2012
I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you mean by “Apple is on a hiring spree to make Siri smarter”
Hire more people. Spend more money. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get anything better.
Go and Google the guys that founded Siri and sold to Apple and worked there for a brief time before quitting.
They left Apple, and did a Siri Version 2.0. They also did a Keynote of it, highlighting how limited Apple’s version is. They totally rewrote it.
Apple is stuck. They need to invent stuff, not buy yesterday’s newpaper and throw money and people at it.
And what happened to them, not been too big of a success since despite the hype. Not that that’s an excuse for Apples lack of impact in the area but there is nothing fundamentally wrong that some actual effort can’t remedy.
Perhaps you should go on a hiring spree too! 🙂
Strengthening the team would be great, but in my opinion, the main problem has been bad decisions on the part of upper management. Adding more people may just mean Apple can do a more thorough job of screwing up Siri.
Siri needs help. Or killing off and starting over. Probably just a good heart surgery.
Yes folks, thank you for joining us for today’s episode of Tim Cook’s Apple Catch Up Of The Week, the show where we visit those waaaaaaay too cool rich kids from Cupertino and their wacky escapades as they pretend to try to keep pace with the innovation happening all around them in the space they invented. We can’t wait to see what these aging hipsters have up their fashionista untucked shirt sleeves today!
Last week? For something that should have happened a year ago? WTF?
Wake me up when they are somewhere around here.
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/2/17189736/google-automl-vision-machine-learning-ramen
Sorry but this ship sailed some time ago.
When I can call out to my Alexa and ask it a question, have it play a tune or do dozens of other tasks instead of opening a web page on Bing. holy fuck. Siri is the biggest embarrassment since the hockey puck mouse. The next wave is NARROW but DEEP AI. Put your money there Tim. Siri is dead.
I guess it’s difficult for Siri to listen to you when it’s not allowed to listen in on you.
I’m glad to see this, if true. It should have happened years ago. Hard for me to believe that Tim Cook has taken so long to do this. I hope their work shows up soon. Loved Tom’s thanks for “joining us for today’s episode of Tim Cook’s Apple Catch Up Of The Week”. What a nice way of putting how Tim keeps Apple’s products up. He either discontinues them or neglects them until he is forced to do something else.
Apple is on a hiring spree to make Siri smarter
Oh good. MDN caught up with the news I pointed out here last week.
The more closed the system, the higher the pressure to do everything best. It’s not fair that Apple is expected to do everything best, but this is the position they put themselves in and they control and charge accordingly, so “eff ’em”.