Skip to main content

Apple is betting on Japan to fix Siri and get serious on artificial intelligence

apple ai data collection ios 10 3 siriunlock2
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Apple is once again looking to Asia to turbocharge its research and development process, this time to improve its artificial intelligence efforts. In an interview with Nikkei Asian Review, CEO Tim Cook said the future of the iPhone is AI, which will be supported by its new research and development center that will open by the end of the year in Yokohama, Japan.

Cook seemed to suggest that AI in the iPhone would move beyond Siri and would actually help increase your battery life through resource management. It would also recommend music more skillfully, and perform other background tasks. As is typical with Apple, Cook stayed tight-lipped on specifics but said the Yokohama team will deal with “deep engineering” and be quite different from its planned R&D effort in China.

Recommended Videos

Apple’s new offices in Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science Park are expected to focus on hardware, and a second office in Shenzen is also planned. That second office is also likely to work on hardware, given that Shenzen is the home city of the largest manufacturing facility of Foxconn’s, a major Chinese partner to Apple.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Related: Soon you’ll be able to pay for your subway fare in Japan with your iPhone

Locating AI work in Japan seems like a wise move. The country has a long history in robotics, and Japan’s government has begun to invest in AI. However, at the same time, Apple is also looking beef up its own AI chops, an area where it has lagged behind Microsoft and Google.

Siri is sometimes criticized for its simplicity and lack of capabilities. The AI often struggles to answer basic questions, with Walt Mossberg going as far as to call Siri “dumb” in a recent opinion piece for The Verge.

“In its current incarnation, Siri is too limited and unreliable to be an effective weapon for Apple in the coming AI wars. It seems stagnant,” Mossberg wrote. “Apple didn’t become great by just following the data on what customers are doing today. It became great by delighting customers with feats they didn’t expect.”

Digital Trends also recently tested out all three major AI offerings — Siri, Cortana, and Google Now — and came up with a similar conclusion. Cortana scored the best out of all three, and Siri struggled, likely because up until recently it was a closed platform. It’s too soon to judge whether third-party integration will make a difference, but Siri still seems like it hasn’t become appreciably better in quite some time.

Even on the desktop, Siri in MacOS Sierra seems to have trouble dealing with more complex queries or tasks, like attempting to find photos. That was a new feature Apple made a big deal about during WWDC, but we’ve often found it to work less reliably than advertised — however it seems to be improving.

Perhaps this new R&D center will help change that, but Apple does have quite a bit of catching up to do.

Ed Oswald
For fifteen years, Ed has written about the latest and greatest in gadgets and technology trends. At Digital Trends, he's…
Samsung may be about to score a double victory over Apple — here’s how
The Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra's screens.

The latest Power On newsletter from Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman asserts that Samsung is ahead of Apple in both artificial intelligence (AI) and with its ultra-thin phone efforts. Does that actually matter, though?

Well, yes and no. While I think being first is an empty accolade if it’s not backed up by quality, Apple can’t afford to be too late to the party -- particularly in the case of AI.

Read more
Apple preps smart glasses with visionOS and a Meta Ray-Ban rival
Person wearing Meta Orion smart glasses.

It’s no secret that Apple’s entry into the AR/VR segment didn’t quite stir the product revolution that the company may have expected. A cumbersome build married to a sky-high asking price for the Vision Pro headset were some of the key woes, but the company has not given up on its dreams.

On the contrary, Apple might even expand into the wearable category beyond the domains of XR itself. According to Bloomberg, the company is working on multiple ideas for smart glasses, both with advanced AR optics and those without a sophisticated display unit.

Read more
OnePlus 13 lands useful AI tricks and a fix for camera snags
A person holding the OnePlus 13.

Merely days after releasing a major software update for its latest flagship, OnePlus has begun the rollout of another incremental patch for its new flagship phone. The OxygenOS 15.0.0.405 build, which is now headed to OnePlus 13 users in all major markets, brings a bunch of practical AI upgrades, among other feature tweaks.

The focus of these AI upgrades is mostly on refining the translation experience. For example, the phone will show the live-translated speech in real time on the screen. Taking a leaf out of Samsung’s Galaxy AI book, the latest update also brings a “face-to-face translation feature.”

Read more