Apple is busy working in providing a better version of its voice assistant Siri this year for the future launch of new iPhones, according to Digitimes. Apparently, this is due to Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa which are currently advancing in the AI assistant competition.
In 2016, Apple acquired the Australian startup Turi, which focuses on machine learning. The move was to mainly improve Siri and its market shares over the other emerging assistants like Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant.
With Google's launch of its Pixel smartphones that feature the Google Assistant, promotion of the adoption of the Google Assistant by other smartphone vendors, including Xiaomi, is highly anticipated.
Amazon's Alexa, on the other hand, has been garnering a lot of favors since the service is now supported by a lot of partnerships across multiple home devices.
Huawei which is aggressively competing against two of the biggest tech giants Apple and Samsung, started the latest development trend when it provided users a way to manipulate the smartphone easily during its United States showcase of Huawei Mate 9 employing voice services from Amazon's Alexa.
For now, there are no any specific enhancements of Siri known yet. However, it seems Apple will be focusing on giving the AI assistant a better voice recognition in next generation iPhones. It can also benefit a lot from an improved contextual understanding of the requests from users to provide them with a more personalized service.
Apple has also made an acquisition of the artificial intelligence startup named Emotient. The startup company is behind a cloud-based tech that can detect emotion by analyzing facial expressions through AI. The tech can be used to analyze a customer's unfiltered emotional response to ads, content, products and customer service or sales interactions. According to an Apple spokesperson, while the company buys smaller technology companies from time to time, they do not discuss their intentions. It is, however, possible that it may be integrated into Siri.
