Talk to Siri: Hey Siri, What’s Up?

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4 min readSep 8, 2021

In this generation, technology really develops faster. Most of us have a lot of experience in technology. One of the most useful technologies commonly used to help users is Siri. AI-powered personal assistants have become quite the craze of late. This is because of its craziest features that can change our lives for the better, which applies to the use of Siri as well.

If you are an Apple user, you should be aware of this feature. But do you know how Siri works? Before we get into how it works, we need to know what Siri is in terms of technology.

What is Siri?

Siri is the built-in voice-controlled personal assistant available to Apple users. The idea is that you talk to him like you talk to a friend and he aims to help you get things done. This feature is one of the top voice assistants on the market today, due to its incredible ability to use high-end natural language processing. Siri will respond to voice commands or greetings and let you use your device without touching it (hands-free). You can talk to her and she will talk back to you to find or do what you need, tell her to show you something, ask questions, or give her orders to do on your behalf.

Siri first appeared on the iPhone 4S. If you’ve used an iPhone 4S before, surely you know that the iPhone 4S is locked and loaded with your personal Siri sidekick. But now, Siri has appeared on every Apple Device like iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, HomePod, Apple Watch, AirPods, CarPlay, and even Apple TV.

In everyday life, Siri is very helpful for users in their activities both indoors and outdoors, online and offline. Using Siri to open apps, set alarms, play music or videos, search for things, and more. Because Siri has access to every other built-in app on your Apple device — Contacts, Mail, Messages, Safari, Maps, and so on, and will call those apps to serve up data or search through their database whenever needed.

You don’t need to worry about your identity leaking because searches and requests are not associated with your identity, so your personal information isn’t collected for sale to advertisers or other organizations. And end-to-end encryption ensures that data synced between your devices is inaccessible, even to Apple, so it will be 100% secure.

Siri’s Works — Technology Behind Siri

Principally, Siri works based on two main Machine Learning systems:

1. Speech Recognition

With Speech Recognition, the human speech will be converted into the appropriate textual form. For example, if you say “Hello Siri”, then Siri will generate it into the text as “Hello Siri” that will appear on your Apple device screen. The “Hey Siri” detector uses the Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of the human voice into a probability distribution through speech sounds. By capturing the acoustic pattern of the sound to make it as a data input to “Hey Siri” and calling the feature.

Although human voices are different, Siri is able to understand them. Engineers at Apple use Machine Learning on large data sets that are transcribed to create efficient speech recognition models for Siri. These models are trained from a very diverse dataset of voice samples from a large group of people so Siri can identify different tones and accents.

2. Natural Language Processing

The “Hey Siri” detector uses the Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of the human voice into a probability distribution through speech sounds. By capturing the acoustic pattern of the sound to make it as a data input to “Hey Siri” and calling the feature.

After capturing the required data, the next computational process is to determine whether the spoken phrase is considered precise or not. After capturing the required data, the next computational process is to determine whether the spoken phrase is considered precise or not. Once Siri understands what you’re saying precisely, the converted text is sent to Apple’s servers for further processing. Apple’s servers then run Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms on this text to understand what the user is trying to say. Then the “Hey Siri” spoken will be changed to the way Siri is used as it is now. If it is not precise, then the Deep Neural Network (DNN) system will increase the sensitivity of voice reception for some time to receive the next voice input. With this process, users don’t need to say “Hey Siri” louder, but the DNN system will become more sensitive.

Conclusion

Fairly to say, Siri runs on a large-scale Machine Learning system. To accomplish such a huge task, Apple employs master software engineers with years of experience in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence expertise in Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Deep Neural Networks (DNN), etc. If you want to be one of the employees, you must meet these requirements.

So this is all about how Siri works behind the technology used. Hope it answers your curiosity!!

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