Apple job postings suggest Siri expansion

By Trevor Mogg April 2, 2013

Siri. Do you use it? Do you use it in public? Perhaps you found it fun in the first few weeks when it launched on the iPhone 4S back in October 2011 but have since forgotten about it, or maybe you’ve stuck up a meaningful relationship over the last 18 months and are now going steady with your virtual assistant.

For those who fall into the latter category, the news is potentially good, as Apple looks as though it’s gearing up to give Siri something of a makeover, or at least, expand the service to other products.

The reason we say this is because over the weekend the Cupertino posted 12 Siri-related positions to its jobs board. Yes, 12.

From software engineers charged with “designing and implementing natural language interactions and work flow that provide intelligent user assistance” to interaction designers who’ll be “helping invent new techniques for conversational interaction, and building practices, processes, and standards that will become a foundation for design and innovation far into the future,” (among a long list of other duties), the large number of new posts appear to indicate the folks at Cupertino have been having one or two meetings about Siri of late.

Job summaries also include references to improving Siri’s accuracy, but presumably that’s an ongoing challenge for engineers working on the voice-recognition software.

There was some chatter in early February about Siri coming to Mac OS X when a single job ad (only one!) for a “Siri UX engineer” with experience of Apple’s desktop/laptop operating system appeared on Apple’s site. Of course, the tech giant hasn’t given anything away about the possibility of the virtual assistant popping up on a Mac computer, though some observers suggest it could feature in the next version of Mac OS X, 10.9.

Or could it be that Apple wants Siri fully integrated with its much-talked-about-though-hitherto-unconfirmed iTV and iWatch products and is therefore pulling together a crack team of engineers to work on just that?

[via Fast Company]

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