14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has recently revealed the fact that upcoming versions of its iOS mobile operating system will feature a more advanced Siri virtual assistant that's finally capable of recognizing device's owner.
Apple's next-generation iOS mobile operating system could come with an upgraded Siri voice assistant that would finally be able to solve the privacy issue which exists in today's iPhone and iPad devices. As reported last month, an iOS 11 bug lets anyone intercept your communication by asking Siri to read the notifications.
The Siri privacy bug is still there on current iOS versions, despite Apple saying it will fix it in a future iOS update, allowing your colleagues, family members, and even someone in a coffee shop to intercept your communication by pressing the home button for a few seconds and saying "Read the notifications" phrase when the device is locked.
Using Machine Learning to identify the owner's voice
In a "Personalized Hey Siri" document, Apple's Siri team details the fact that Machine Learning technologies are being used in future iOS releases to identify the voice of the owner of the device, finally addressing the privacy bug. We believe this could be implemented in the upcoming iOS 12 release that should be available in September.
"We are interested in “who is speaking,” as opposed to the problem of speech recognition, which aims to ascertain “what was spoken,”" said Apple in the support document. "We measure the performance of a speaker recognition system as a combination of an Imposter Accept (IA) rate and a False Reject (FR) rate."
Thanks to Machine Learning, Apple's Siri voice assistant can be trained to recognize a user’s voice in a wide range of environments, such as in a coffee shop or similar public place, in the car, or even in the kitchen, as well as various modes of vocalization, including raised voice, groggy morning voice, normal voice, etc.
The "Hey Siri" trigger phrase to invoke Siri currently works with iPhone 6 and newer devices using iOS 8 or later. It can listen continuously on iPhone 6s and newer models even when the device isn't charging, but it can also be activated by pressing the home button for a few seconds, which can be disabled in the Settings.