Apple is working day and night to improve its digital assistant, Siri, as a new report reveals the company is working on faster and more natural-sounding conversations. A study showcases how changes to speech generation could reduce response delays and improve clarity. The internal research work highlights the tech giant’s intent to strengthen its artificial intelligence stack while gradually reducing reliance on external models for core voice assistant experiences.
Apple is working to deliver natural-sounding conversations with Siri
Typical voice models generate speech in tiny phonetic tokens, selecting each sound step by step through autoregression. While this method works decently enough, it can sometimes introduce small pauses and occasional pronunciation issues, especially when the training data is limited. This single downside can sometimes ruin the conversations. Researchers at Apple explain that these delays become noticeable in conversational settings, where users expect Siri to respond fluidly and without awkward breaks.
To fix this issue, Apple’s study proposes Acoustic Similarity Groups, which cluster speech sounds that are perceptually alike. The method narrows down the choices to similar-sounding groups. This allows the system to identify appropriate speech tokens more quickly. Probabilistic search within these groups allows the model to maintain natural inflection while cutting latency. As a result, the model can produce results that are faster and sound more natural. It makes the digital assistant sound more human and conversational.
The company takes another step towards greater AI independence
Another big advantage of the new method is that it reduces computational overhead, enabling real-time responses on the device. It is very privacy-friendly and can enable efficiency and consistency across Apple hardware without heavy dependence on cloud processing. However, the research is incremental. Though it does show the company’s commitment to refining its own machine learning foundations.
Apple is also seeking greater AI independence in the future. While it’s a fact that it recently partnered with Google to use its Gemini, efforts like this reveal a long-term vision of the brand. Anyway, there’s no word on the integration of the new speed method into Siri. The company may or may not bring it to the stable audience.
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