Apple researchers explore dropping “Siri” phrase & listening with AI instead

Apple researchers explore dropping “Siri” phrase & listening with AI instead

MIT Technology Review·2024-03-23 11:00

Researchers from Apple are probing whether it’s possible to use artificial intelligence to detect when a user is speaking to a device like an iPhone, thereby eliminating the technical need for a trigger phrase like “Siri,” according to a paper published on Friday.

In a study, which was uploaded to Arxiv and has not been peer-reviewed, researchers trained a large language model using both speech captured by smartphones as well as acoustic data from background noise to look for patterns that could indicate when they want help from the device. The model was built in part with a version of OpenAI’s GPT-2, “since it is relatively lightweight and can potentially run on devices such as smartphones,” the researchers wrote. The paper describes over 129 hours of data and additional text data used to train the model, but did not specify the source of the recordings that went into the training set. Six of the seven authors list their affiliation as Apple, and three of them work on the company’s Siri team according to their LinkedIn profiles. (The seventh author did work related to the paper during an Apple internship.)

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