"Hey Siri Trigger Phrase Could Change According to Report

What Apple Considers

“Hey Siri” is one of the most known phrases in the tech world, since these two words are used by millions of iPhone and iPad users to activate their smartphone’s or tablet’s virtual assistant, Siri.

According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, Apple engineers have been working for several months to simplify the phrase used to activate Siri. More specifically, Apple is working towards eliminating the word “Hey” from the Siri activation phrase. This means that Siri commands could become more natural and closer to a real-life conversation soon (e.g. “Siri wake me up at 5:30”). Such an implementation could also speed up back to back user requests.

The change according to Gurman is more complicated than it may sound. Recognising two words make it more certain from AI perspective to distinguish that the user actually wants to use Siri. Using just the single word “Siri” could lead to accidental activations. This would be an unexpected behavior that Apple wants to avoid. Moreover, Apple needs to work on this change on all supported Siri languages, not only English. Certainly, Apple will have to overcome several technical challenges before rolling out this change. This modification could be implemented either next year or even in 2024 if the testing is successful.

Competition

Amazon and Microsoft had proceeded with similar implementations for their own virtual assistants, Alexa and Cortana respectively. Both Alexa and Cortana could be summoned simply by calling their names and then using a phrase that describes the action to be performed by each assistant.

Would this change make a real difference for users? Could it be related to a new upcoming Apple product or is it one of Apple’s small but valuable improvements? We’ll see in the coming months.