14 DAY TRIAL // New job listings at jobs.apple.com indicate that iOS 8 will include new language support for Siri, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant that comes pre-installed with iPhones and iPads. iOS 8 is scheduled to arrive this fall.
A series of job openings for “Siri Language Engineer (Cloud Services Localization)” confirm that Apple is actively recruiting people with a strong skill set to teach Siri Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Thai.
Other openings are for improving languages that are already supported by Siri, such as Japanese.
The job descriptions state, “Come and join the team that teaches Siri how to understand and speak new languages.”
“We are an extremely diverse and passionate group dedicated to bringing the future of intelligent assistants to the world. We are looking for a highly motivated engineer, expert in foreign languages and with strong software development skills to join our team.”
Key qualifications include experience in classification, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, or related sub-fields, and candidates must be native speakers who are fluent in the language that they are applying for.
The recruit must be able to work with minimal supervision, meaning they should be proactive, self-motivated, and early for work every day “for timely delivery of quality code.”
Other musts to get the job include demonstrated creative and critical thinking capabilities and troubleshooting skills, engineering experience, clear and compelling communication skills, interest in embedded applications, and more.
Apple further entices applicants, stating, “This is an opportunity to durably shape the future of human - computer interaction, and walk the bleeding edge of a nascent field. You will be responsible for the international engineering of Siri, and be required to interact with several world class teams of experts at Apple.”
“From speech recognition to natural language processing, machine learning, big data consumption all the way to speech synthesis, you will be involved and challenged to bring innovative solutions to complex engineering issues, with an international flavor. Knowing your local market is key,” the iPhone maker adds.
Java, Perl, and shell scripting, as well as iOS or Mac OS X development skills are considered pluses.
Currently, Siri supports the following countries and/or languages: United States (English, Spanish) United Kingdom (English), Australia (English), France (French), Germany (German), Japan (Japanese), Canada (English, Canadian French), China (Mandarin), Hong Kong (Cantonese), Italy (Italian), Korea (Korean), Mexico (Spanish), Spain (Spanish), Switzerland (Italian, French, German), Taiwan (Mandarin).
Customers can expect the updated Siri in iOS 8 this fall, and perhaps even in OS X next year.