It shouldn’t come to surprise anyone that Siri continues to lag behind its rivals like Amazon’s Alex and Google Assistant. With the release of Home Pod, we noticed that it struggles to handle non-music tasks, for example, and it appears that Apple is well aware of this.
Thinknum noticed that Apple as been on quite the hiring spree in recent months released to Siri, where at the end of March, there are a total of 161 positions listed. Many of these listings have surged starting last month.
Notably, majority of the positions are for engineers, and some of the spots are meant to table Siri’s relative weakness in general questions when users engage with the virtual assistant. There are listings for Siri software engineers to tackle “General Knowledge” and the “Knowledge Graph,” for example. In some other listings, there are efforts in receruitment for machine learning scientists as well as multiple engineers to address areas like Proactive Intelligence, speech generation and SiriKit developer framework.
It’s likely that we won’t see results of Apple’s efforts right away. Even if the company were to fill these positions fairly quickly, it could take months or even years before we start seeing influence converting into Siri itself. Though at least we know that Apple is aware of the issue and is trying to hire the appropriate talent to resolve them.
