“I wake up and put on my Apple Watch, and while I’m making coffee, I look down and see that traffic could be gnarly on the way to work, so I move a little quicker. I also see a reminder of a late-morning meeting, then a mid-afternoon flight down to L.A. As I leave the house, I glance down and see that the weather will be clear and sunny. At the airport, my boarding pass will show up on my wrist,” Mark Sullivan reports for Fast Company. “Over the course of the day, between these little assists, my Watch shows me a few photos of my new niece.”
“That’s what a day with the new Siri watch face (in the latest watchOS 4) might look like. It’s a more personalized and proactive version of Siri, and one that might show up in other Apple OSs and devices,” Sullivan reports. “Siri is slowly using more artificial intelligence to behave more like a human assistant who knows enough about you to give you helpful little nudges and reminders at the right times during the day. In theory, the more the assistant learns about you, your habits, and your habitat, the more insightful and helpful those little assists can become.”
“In Silicon Valley’s growing AI war, one narrative that’s emerged over the past year says that Apple’s AI efforts lag behind the work of other big tech companies in part because of its dedication to protecting user data,” Sullivan reports. “By not sending users’ personal data to the cloud, it’s been argued, Apple may be hindering Siri’s potential, starving the AI models it depends on of the personal data needed to more personalized and informed assistance to users.”
Sullivan reports, “Apple has been relatively silent on that narrative. But several members of Apple’s AI and Siri teams who recently spoke to Fast Company said user privacy and smart AI are not competing principles.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Siri’s only had her new brain for about two years. Give her some time to get acclimated to it! As Apple Watch users know, since we rely on Siri more than others and have therefore given Apple’s personal assistant anther real chance, Siri is much improved in the last two years versus prior to 2015 when many of us gave up on using it for anything meaningful on our iPhones. Siri is all-new since 2015. If you haven’t recently, give Siri another go – you might be pleasantly surprised!