Apple's AI System 'SIRI' Might Be The Future

SiriAP an AI (Artificial Intelligence) system designed by apple's Phil Schiller and launched in 2011 with the iPhone 4s.

According to sources it is said to be due for a big upgrade, and this comments has geared Apple in giving its digital assistant a big boost. All success can be attributed to a UK-based company called VocalIQ it (apple) bought last year.

According to a source familiar with VocalIQ’s product and TechInsider, it’s much more robust and capable than Siri’s biggest competitors e.g Google Now, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. In fact, it was so impressive that Apple bought VocalIQ before the company could finish and release its smartphone app.

 After the acquisition, Apple kept most of the VocalIQ team and let them work out of their Cambridge office and integrate the product into Siri.

VocalIQ tested its product against  Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Cortana, and the results were very impressive as users were allowed to ask each AI questions using normal language, not the robotic or programming commands you’re used to using with digital assistants.

For example, “Find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and WiFi that’s kid-friendly.” Yea.....you can see this as a voice search engine as well and VocalIQ could handle it while its competitors failed.

How They Did it?

After writing the program, VocalIQ hired contractors through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to feed queries any human could ask which helped it learn how people talk. These contractors would ask VocalIQ questions from a list of prompts to train the system. After about 3,000 dialogues, VocalIQ already started to get much more accurate. Once the process was finished, VocalIQ had recorded about 10,000 dialogues from Mechanical Turk contractors.

According to result shared by sources on TechInsider? VocalIQ’s success rate was over 90%, while Google Now, Siri, and Cortana were only successful about 20% of the time, according to one source.

VocalIQ may sound similar to Hound, a new digital assistant app that's launched on iPhone and Android recently, but Hound only works one session at a time. VocalIQ remembers context forever, just like a human can.....Ooops.....That’s Awesome.

Let’s go back to the Chinese restaurant example. What if you change your mind an hour later? Simply saying something like “Find me a Mexican restaurant instead,”......will bring you new results, while still taking into account the other parameters like parking and WiFi you mentioned before. Hound, Siri, and any other assistant would make you start the search session over again. But Vocal IQ remembers. That's more human-like than anything available today.......TechInsider.

VocalIQ was mainly created as a voice-controlled AI platform for cars before Apple bought the company and In fact, VocalIQ only considers itself a success when the user is able to complete a task without looking at a screen. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana often ask you to confirm tasks by tapping on the screen.

VocalIQ also has ability to filter out background noise to figure out exactly what you’re saying, thus making it more accurate than Siri is today. It’s able to take in all the noise in an environment — the TV, kids shouting, whatever — and determine with a high probability which sound is actually the user’s query......Thumbs Up...... and infact It's programmed to adapt to different accents over time to improve accuracy.

I Feel You Might Have Seen Reasons Why Harari Feels Some Humans Would Be Useless In The Future. 

Though we still don't know when Apple plans to implement more of VocalIQ’s capabilities into its SiriApp. But sources speculated that it may happen slowly over time, so as not to throw off users with a radical change.

And however, At a big annual conference in May, Google showed off some intriguing new uses for its AI, including Google Home, a smart speaker with its digital assistant built inside.

And Marco Arment, a well-known developer and big voice in the tech community, wrote on his blog that if Apple fails to keep up with AI and voice-powered platforms take off, the company risks suffering the same fate as BlackBerry.

I doubt if Apple is stupid enough to not hope for more improvement.