14 DAY TRIAL // Nowadays machine learning and big data are two concepts that drive many of the recent breakthroughs in tech, such as adaptive apps, automatic detection of patterns, data analysis, and many others.
The thing that interests us as Apple users about this subject is the Cupertino company's interest in using both these techniques for further improving the way their Siri personal assistant interacts with the user.
To do that, Apple has begun a quest in the past year towards hiring AI (artificial intelligence) experts with expertise in both big data and machine learning. This is apparently a direct consequence of the fact that Google, one of their biggest competitors in the field of AI, has also been hiring as many people with experience as possible.
New Siri should be smart yet focused on user privacy
There is a difference though between how the two of them are using their newly acquired talent. While Google is focusing on the cloud, Apple is trying to abide by its privacy commitment, limiting the amount of data their devices sent to online servers as much as possible and is striving to make Siri as intelligent as possible using the data it can collect from each user's device.
This, in turn, means that for each user Siri should be able to create a custom experience, drawn out of the way the device is used on a daily basis, out of each user's way of interacting and from the data stored on the device itself.
At the moment, Apple's "Jobs" portal lists no less than 116 open positions for machine learning specialists, with a focus on software engineering, language and speech processing, search technology and data mining and analysis, among many other areas of interest.
The amount of machine learning experts Apple wants to hire right now is just a small indication of the vast scale of operations behind boosting Siri's abilities, but a good one considering the goal.
Apple's focus switching to more intelligent devices
According to a report by Reuters, Oren Etzioni, University of Washington professor and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said that "In the past, Apple has not been at the vanguard of machine learning and cutting edge artificial intelligence work, but that is rapidly changing. They are after the best and the brightest, just like everybody else."
Given this amount of talent targeting Apple's personal assistant improvement, one should at least expect a much smarter and context-aware Siri available in future releases of iOS, with the iOS 9 version already capable of helping users create various types of intelligent reminders.