Apple Pushes To Make Siri’s AI More Useful And Reliable

The battle of the digital assistants will begin again in earnest in the fall of 2016 when the latest version of Apple’s Siri hits the street with iOS 10. But this time it will also hit the streets with MacOS Sierra and with the Apple TV.

This latest version of Siri will be the first to provide APIs that enable third-party developers to create new skills and functions for the voice-activated digital assistant.

By now you’ve probably noticed that other digital assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, have been able to do this for a while now. But gaining these new functions is a bigger deal for Apple, if only because some of those third-party apps for Siri can extend the assistant’s role in artificial intelligence.

One of disadvantages Apple has had with Siri is that it worked with just a few apps from Apple. As a result compared to other assistants that have recently reached the market, Siri couldn’t do a lot. Adding to the difficulty of making Siri more useful is Apple’s laudable focus on privacy, which has further limited what Siri can do.

That’s starting to change. Using what Apple is calling “Siri Intelligence,” the virtual assistant will begin to be able to pass portions of requests back to Apple for to obtain more complete information or to produce better results.

Data

In the past, Apple resisted enabling Siri to transmit anything that that could be construed as personally identifiable information back to the company, but now the Siri platform can strip off any data that Apple wants to protect and then act on the rest.

Unfortunately for Apple, in the five years since Siri debuted, competitors have worked hard to introduce their own voice-activated AI assistant. Google debuted Google Now, which is about to become Google Assistant, Microsoft has Cortana, which runs on Windows 10 and the five or six Windows Phones still in use.

QUIZ: Smartphones on 2016

Each of the digital assistants has its own challenges and they react in surprising ways. For example, ask Cortana what is the result of zero divided by zero and the assistant will tell you to ask Siri. If you pose the same question to Siri, it will give you a smart-mouthed response that involves Cookie Monster.

Of the three, Google’s Assistant is doing better than the others at being useful, but to some extent this is due to Google’s long-term effort to gather every piece of information in the universe, regardless of whether it’s personal information. This is why Google can talk to you about your upcoming flights or find a phone number in an obscure email.

For its part, Siri needs a bump up in intelligence, which may be a difficult process.

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Originally published on eWeek.