Pixel Envy

Written by Nick Heer.

How Siri Learns

Stephen Nellis, Reuters:

At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, an acoustic model is built that tries to predict words sequences.



For the past year or two, I’ve noticed that Siri’s record for understanding my speech has been outstanding. The lacklustre part is, increasingly, in the comprehension of my intentions. Just as with a real person, it’s not good enough for Siri to simply be able to hear well; it must do something with the information I’ve provided it, and that something needs to be the right thing more often than not.