One of Apple’s recent updates to Siri involved making sure it was always listening. The iPhone’s digital assistant can now be calibrated to a user’s voice so that when they say “Hey Siri,” the service wakes up.
To some that might have raised concerns about what other information Apple itself could hear, but CEO Tim Cook has maintained that all user data remains on the phone.
“Apple doesn’t have access to it,” he said in a recent interview with BuzzFeed.
That’s admirable but problematic. Siri’s inability to process data by syncing with the greater processing power of the cloud still makes it slower than competitors like Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana.
Apple needs to smarten up Siri directly on the device. One way is to buy a company with the technology to help it do that. Apple has reportedly bought Perceptio, a startup that specializes in running artificial intelligence technology on smartphones without processing user data in the cloud.
To limit all that advanced computing onto a handheld device, founders Zak Stone and Nicholas Pinto used deep learning techniques, and the technology is based on models of how the human brain recognises patterns, according to an interview the founders had with Re/code in late 2014.
The company produced a video-editing app called Smoothie, which was borne out of its engineers experimenting with running complex facial recognition computations solely on a phone. When Facebook or Google run facial recognition algorithms, they process the data about the image in the cloud, their own servers.
Perceptio believed that people should maintain control over what’s on their devices, which dovetails nicely with Apple’s own stance on user privacy. Their addition to Apple could improve Siri's ability to, for instance, recognize not only a user’s voice but their face, or add some of the facial-recognition features that are in Apple's desktop version of Photos to the iOS version.
Apple also made a separate acquisition recently of VocalIQ, a British startup that enhances the natural language capabilities of software through their own API, making it easier to have a natural conversation with computers. Given the stilted conversations iPhone users are still having with Siri, VocalIQ’s technology looks destined to enhance that digital assistant too.
