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Apple is researching how to detect environmental noise levels and user voice patterns so Siri can respond with a yell or a whisper as needed. Siri has been widely criticized for its lack of feature parity with rivals. The discontinuation of HomePod has again placed Siri in the spotlight as the smart assistant approaches its tenth birthday.
A patent application published on Thursday shows one area Apple seeks to improve with its assistant — environmental awareness. Currently, Siri will respond with the same voice, volume, and inflection regardless of how noisy a room is or how the command is given.
Other voice assistants like Alexa can respond in a lower volume and a "whisper" voice when a command is given quietly. Siri lacks this feature and can respond to commands at sometimes jarring volumes.
Siri could one day consider effects like room noise, device location, and distance from the user when considering response volume. Apple proposes that on-device processors can listen to the user's tone, inflection, and volume of the command. Other data points would be used, too, like time of day or previously set volumes. With these considerations in mind, a user could whisper a command to Siri late at night and get a quiet response in turn.
Loud environments would produce a slower but louder response from Siri to ensure it was heard and understood. This patent is credited to Narimene Lezzoum, Sylvain J. Richard Powell was previously credited with audio-based research applications. Siri produces its voice using synthesized audio obtained from voice actors.
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Some names can be difficult for Siri to get right on its first try. It can already get your email, send text messages, let you buy things at stores, and even—with the requisite hardware—make and receive phone calls. Star Trek promised us a future where most of our computing tasks would be easily handled by a disembodied voice connected to a powerful computer.
While that future has not yet wholly come to pass, interacting with technology via our voices is fairly common these days. So, for better or worse, the computing platform of tomorrow will probably still need some form of visual medium. The backlashers have a point. We're used to consumer technology that works every time: e-mail, GPS, digital cameras. Dictation technology that relies on cellular Internet, though, only sort of works.
And that can be jarring to encounter in this day and age. But let's not throw the Siri out with the bathwater. Free-form cellular dictation is a not-there-yet technology.
But as an interface for controlling our electronics, it makes the future of speech every bit as bright as Siri promised a year ago. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. And then—the backlash. What happened? How could Siri, the savior of electronics, turn out to be such a bust? Just wait till she comes out of beta. Get smart.
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