A shorter trigger phrase will speed up concurrent requests and will also allow you to launch and use Siri faster on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and HomePod.
- What is happening? Apple is working on an easier way to call Siri hands-free by reducing the trigger phrase “Hey Siri”to one hot word: “Siri”.
- Why care? You’ll spend less time asking Siri questions.
- What to do? Learn about all the ways to call Siri on Apple devices.
“Siri, what happened to “Hey Siri?”
The company trained the underlying AI algorithm with a shorter wake-up phrase, tested it on employees, and collected the necessary training data. However, this feature should be launched in 2023 or 2024.
Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter on Bloomberg:
The difficulty lies in the fact that Siri can understand the single phrase “Siri”in different accents and dialects. The presence of two words – “Hey Siri”- increases the likelihood that the system will correctly pick up the signal.
The author learned that Apple is working on other improvements to Siri, such as deeper integration with third-party apps and services, as well as “improving the ability to understand users and make the right decisions.”
“Hey Siri”but without the “Hey”part
A shorter trigger will make talking to Siri more like talking to a real person. Instead of “Hey Siri”followed by a command, all you have to do is say “Siri”. Currently, every Siri request in hands-free mode must begin with “Hey Siri.”This simple change can collectively save you time and speed up parallel queries.
Siri is far from the only virtual assistant to implement a shorter trigger phrase.
Activating Amazon Alexa requires you to say “Alexa”followed by a prompt. Alexa never used the longer “Hi Alexa”trigger phrase. Microsoft’s Cortana would kick in as soon as it heard the phrase “Hey Cortana,”although Microsoft later shortened the trigger to “Cortana”on smart speakers.
Google Assistant currently requires an “OK Google”or “Hey Google”prompt (in the future, subsequent requests will be possible without repeating the wake word).
Activate Siri on a specific device
It’s currently not possible to tell Siri which device it should use to respond to your request. Now, Gurman hasn’t heard anything about such a feature potentially working, although he went on to explain that it could be useful.
For me, an even better change would be that Apple allowed users — by voice — to specify which device they want to activate. Let me take the world’s smallest fiddle here for owners of multiple Apple devices, but the company should really let users specify whether they want to activate their iPhone, iPad, or HomePod for Siri.
On Apple Watch Series 3 or later, you don’t have to say “Hey Siri”to get Siri’s attention. Instead, you simply raise your wrist. The very act of raising the wrist signals the watch to wake up and encourages the assistant to start listening.
A Brief History of Siri
Siri debuted on the iPhone 4s back in 2011. The voice activation feature was born from the acquisition of the startup behind the Siri virtual assistant app on the App Store.
The startup itself is a spin-off of a project developed by the SRI International Center for Artificial Intelligence. Siri Assistant is an offshoot of the DARPA-funded Cognitive Assistant that Learning and Organizes (CALO) project, which aims to build an AI assistant smart enough to learn from observing user behavior.