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General Intelligence
Apple’s A.I. Research Team Is Playing Catch-Up With Siri
And other recent Apple A.I. research projects
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
Like every big tech company, Apple is in dire need of A.I. programmers. These algorithms serve as a foundation for everything from processing photos to make them look brighter and sharper to powering Siri to maybe even driving that Apple car.
So, in 2016, the company hired a well-known Carnegie Mellon professor named Ruslan Salakhutdinov to lead its A.I. division and, in a surprising move by the typically tight-lipped company, launched a research blog to publish some of its own work.
Apple makes some of its work public because the backbone of the A.I. field is still academic, and the ability to publish new research is a primary consideration for PhDs entering the world of tech.
“You can’t tell people, ‘Come work for us, but you can’t tell people what you’re doing,’ because you basically ruin their career,” Facebook chief scientist Yann LeCun told Business Insider in 2016.
Four years later, Apple is still publishing on its research blog, giving some up-to-date insight into what the company’s researchers are working on. There’s no promise that this research will make it into an Apple product, but the research shows the kind of ideas Apple is investing in.
Many of these papers focus on bolstering Siri, the company’s virtual assistant that’s commonly seen as inferior to Google Assistant and Alexa.
Apple researchers are trying to make Siri better understand the intent behind questions and are even trying to decode people’s emotions when they say a command. One paper also talks about “acoustic activity recognition,” or listening for specific noises. In a video accompanying the paper, a HomePod listens to noises being made around a kitchen and asks, “What’s that sound?” to which a researcher responds, “A microwave.”
Other Siri improvements have to do with multilingual use of the virtual assistant, with Apple making its own dataset to benchmark how well virtual assistants…
