Apple beefing up Siri, speech and language teams with wave of new openings
Apple on Wednesday and Thursday opened up several job listings related to speech technology, Siri, and language recognition, suggesting intensified work on natural input for future products, AppleInsider has discovered.
The Siri positions, posted on Thursday, include a platform development manager and a developer tools engineer. The former will "lead a team that builds the foundation for Siri," according to Apple, while the latter will work on internal tools for "collaborative design, development, testing, and tracking."
The company is also searching for two pattern recognition engineers, both of whom must have "exceptional experience developing modern handwriting or speech recognition solutions." Perhaps most significant are five openings for software engineers in the company's Natural Languages Group. These openings are primarily centered around text features like auto-correction and parts-of-speech tagging, but the NLG is also dedicated to areas such as input method conversion "and other solutions that incorporate natural language information."
In some cases, candidates for the NLG openings must be familiar with multiple languages. One of them is specifically oriented towards Chinese, and asks for someone who can help improve Chinese text input and language recognition in general.
While Apple periodically hires people in these areas, it's unusual for the company to post this number of related listings within the space of two days.
Voice technology is becoming increasingly important to Apple. Siri is present on every current iOS device, and could eventually come to OS X. Since it lacks screen space for features like a keyboard, the Apple Watch is highly dependent on voice -- dictation is needed to send texts, and Siri can simplify many actions.
The company may also want to smooth out the rough edges of iOS and OS X's text input systems. Two common complaints are that Apple's software can sometimes auto-correct to the wrong word, and that suggested words in the iOS 8 keyboard can be off the mark.
Chinese characters have been a long-running concern, as while typed pinyin Chinese is an option, handwriting has proved hard to make quick and accurate.
The Siri positions, posted on Thursday, include a platform development manager and a developer tools engineer. The former will "lead a team that builds the foundation for Siri," according to Apple, while the latter will work on internal tools for "collaborative design, development, testing, and tracking."
The company is also searching for two pattern recognition engineers, both of whom must have "exceptional experience developing modern handwriting or speech recognition solutions." Perhaps most significant are five openings for software engineers in the company's Natural Languages Group. These openings are primarily centered around text features like auto-correction and parts-of-speech tagging, but the NLG is also dedicated to areas such as input method conversion "and other solutions that incorporate natural language information."
In some cases, candidates for the NLG openings must be familiar with multiple languages. One of them is specifically oriented towards Chinese, and asks for someone who can help improve Chinese text input and language recognition in general.
While Apple periodically hires people in these areas, it's unusual for the company to post this number of related listings within the space of two days.
Voice technology is becoming increasingly important to Apple. Siri is present on every current iOS device, and could eventually come to OS X. Since it lacks screen space for features like a keyboard, the Apple Watch is highly dependent on voice -- dictation is needed to send texts, and Siri can simplify many actions.
The company may also want to smooth out the rough edges of iOS and OS X's text input systems. Two common complaints are that Apple's software can sometimes auto-correct to the wrong word, and that suggested words in the iOS 8 keyboard can be off the mark.
Chinese characters have been a long-running concern, as while typed pinyin Chinese is an option, handwriting has proved hard to make quick and accurate.
Comments
Siri's backend {that sounds dirty} has been getting updates at fairly regular intervals. Unfortunately it often seems to take one step forward and two back. I find it to be very frustrating to use even for simple things like getting a map to a destination.
So while development is ongoing Siri has a long ways to go. The article also hinted at the spell check feature in Apples operating systems which frankly is in bigger need of overhaul than Siri in my estimation. I not sure what is wrong with spell check but it really needs a total overhaul. We especially need an easy way to unlearn words that spell checking has learned wrong. Automatically adding words to its dictionary is pretty stupid really.
I agree with the "unlearning" misspelled words. That has been a real annoyance.
I agree with the "unlearning" misspelled words. That has been a real annoyance.
I can't say how much I agree with you guys! Also, i'm convinced that the spellchecker "crowd learns" some very wrong words. Some of the corrections are downright absurd, typically ones that finish with LOL...
I still wonder if that is to do with extricating Apple from Nuance's grip. Wasn't Nuance in talks with Samsung last year?
As much as I love Siri and Dictation, I don't see its voice recognition is even close to Google. Google recognize 99% of what I say while Siri...maybe 70%.
As much as I love Siri and Dictation, I don't see its voice recognition is even close to Google. Google recognize 99% of what I say while Siri...maybe 70%.
You must have some extraordinarily precise diction with a standard accent, using a limited set of words then.
Your results are so far away from mine it isn't even in the same ballpark.
Not sure any of them are better than 70% for me.
The number of times they all understand the wrong words is ridiculous.
I've been frustrated with those things since the 1990s. Eventually by the time I die, I expect them to be OK ;-).
it would be a game changer if they allowed us to play songs just by saying the name into Siri and play it from their new beats streaming app. I'd have to drop Spotify