“Apple’s Siri may soon get more of a human touch as the Cupertino company is investigating the viability of using crowd-sourced information to broaden the virtual assistant’s answer database,” Mikey Campbell reports for AppleInsider.
“Currently, Siri relies on data pulled from the Web and other online services, like Yahoo!, WolframAlpha and Bing, to answer user queries,” Campbell reports. “While their databases are extensive, these partner services may not be able to handle nuanced or uncommon questions.”
Campbell reports, “A patent filing published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday reveals Apple is looking into the viability of crowd sourcing answers for certain questions that Siri fails to answer. Titled “Crowd sourcing information to fulfill user requests,” the application is a primer on how the virtual assistant can request, gather and store data from a number of crowd sourcing, or “CS,” information services.”
Read more, and see Apple’s patent application illustrations and diagrams, in the full article here.
If two’s company and three is a crowd, does crowd sourcing mean aggregating information from three people only?
Just joking! I couldn’t resist the opportunity to use that statement, droll I know, but what fun!!!
Guy: “Siri, Is the lady at the end of the bar available?”
Sir: “According to the number of single guys next to her, yes, but you don’t stand a chance given two are body building instructors, according to my sources.”
Why doesn’t Apple rent from IBM that new Watson-based cloud service to get better answers to more questions that I just heard about?