Apple's Greg Joswiak: Siri Wasn't Engineered to Be Trivial Pursuit

iOS 9 SiriIn iOS 11, Apple's AI-based personal assistant Siri has a much more natural voice that goes a long way towards making Siri sound human like. Siri speaks with a faster, smoother cadence with elongated syllables and pitch variation, a noticeable departure from the more machine like sound in iOS 10.

The team behind Siri, including Siri senior director Alex Acero, has worked for years to improve the way Siri speaks, according to a new interview Acero did alongside Apple VP of marketing Greg Joswiak with Wired. While Siri's voice recognition capabilities were powered by a third-party company early on in Siri's life, Acero's team took over Siri development a few years back, leading to several improvements to the personal assistant since then.

Siri is powered by deep learning and AI, technology that has much improved her speech recognition capabilities. According to Wired, Siri's raw voice recognition capabilities are now able to correctly identify 95 percent of users' speech, on par with rivals like Alexa and Cortana.

Apple is still working to overcome negative perceptions about Siri, and blames many of the early issues on the aforementioned third-party partnership.

"It was like running a race and, you know, somebody else was holding us back," says Greg Joswiak, Apple's VP of product marketing. Joswiak says Apple always had big plans for Siri, "this idea of an assistant you could talk to on your phone, and have it do these things for you in a more easy way," but the tech just wasn't good enough. "You know, garbage in, garbage out," he says.

Joswiak says Apple's aim from the beginning has been to make Siri a "get-s**t-done" machine. "We didn't engineer this thing to be Trivial Pursuit!" he told Wired. Apple wants Siri to serve as an automated friend that can help people do more.

siriwaveform
One unique Siri attribute is its ability to work in multiple languages. Siri supports English, French, Dutch, Mandarin, Cantonese, Finnish, Hebrew, Malay, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish, and more, including dialect variants (like English in the UK and Australia) and accents. The Siri team combines pre-existing databases of local speech with local voice talent and on-device dictation, transcribing and dissecting the content to find all of the individual sounds in a given language and all of the ways those sounds are pronounced.

In areas where Apple offers spoken dictation but no Siri support, it's gathering data for future Siri support, and in places where Siri is already available, spoken interactions between user and device (gathered anonymously) are used to improve algorithms and train the company's neural network.

Creating the right voice for Siri in a given language hinges on the proper voice talent, and Apple uses an "epic search" with hundreds of people to find someone who sounds helpful, friendly, spunky, and happy without overdoing it. Once the right person is found, Apple records them for weeks at a time to create the right sound. So far, Apple has repeated this process for all 21 languages Siri supports.

Ultimately, Acero and his Siri team are aiming to make Siri sound more like a trusted person than a robot, creating an attachment to the AI that will "make Siri great" even when Siri fails to answer a query properly. Apple also wants to make people more aware of what Siri can and can't do and that it exists in the first place, which is why iOS 11 includes Siri-centric features like cross-device syncing and a better understanding of user interests and preferences.

Wired's full piece, which goes into much more detail on how Siri recognizes various aspects of speech and how Apple chooses voice talent can be read over on the site.

Popular Stories

iphone 16 pro ghost hand

5 Reasons to Skip This Year's iPhone 17 Pro

Thursday July 10, 2025 4:54 am PDT by
Apple will launch its new iPhone 17 series in two months, and the iPhone 17 Pro models are expected to get a new design for the rear casing and the camera area. But more significant changes to the lineup are not expected until next year, when the iPhone 18 models arrive. If you're thinking of trading in your iPhone for this year's latest, consider the following features rumored to be coming...
apple wallet drivers license feature iPhone 15 pro

Apple Says iPhone Driver's Licenses Will Expand to These 8 U.S. States

Tuesday July 8, 2025 11:26 am PDT by
In select U.S. states, residents can add their driver's license or state ID to the Wallet app on the iPhone and Apple Watch, providing a convenient and contactless way to display proof of identity or age at select airports and businesses, and in select apps. Unfortunately, this feature continues to roll out very slowly since it was announced in 2021, with only nine U.S. states, Puerto Rico,...
macbook pro blue green

M5 MacBook Pro No Longer Coming in 2025

Thursday July 10, 2025 12:38 pm PDT by
Apple does not plan to refresh any Macs with updated M5 chips in 2025, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Updated MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models are now planned for the first half of 2026. Gurman previously said that Apple would debut the M5 MacBook Pro models in late 2025, but his newest report suggests that Apple is "considering" pushing them back to 2026. Apple is now said to be...
iPhone 17 Pro in Hand Feature Lowgo

Leaker Reveals Amount of RAM in iPhone 17 Through iPhone 17 Pro Max

Wednesday July 9, 2025 8:08 am PDT by
Three out of four iPhone 17 models will feature more RAM than the equivalent iPhone 16 models, according to a new leak that aligns with previous rumors. The all-new iPhone 17 Air, the iPhone 17 Pro, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max will each be equipped with 12GB of RAM, according to Fixed Focus Digital, an account with more than two million followers on Chinese social media platform Weibo. The...
iPhone 17 Pro in Hand Feature Lowgo

iPhone 17 Pro to Reverse iPhone X Design Decision

Monday July 7, 2025 9:46 am PDT by
Since the iPhone X in 2017, all of Apple's highest-end iPhone models have featured either stainless steel or titanium frames, but it has now been rumored that this design decision will be coming to an end with the iPhone 17 Pro models later this year. In a post on Chinese social media platform Weibo today, the account Instant Digital said that the iPhone 17 Pro models will have an aluminum...
Foldable iPhone 2023 Feature 1

Foldable iPhone Display Production Begins Ahead of Launch Next Year

Wednesday July 9, 2025 10:59 pm PDT by
Production of foldable OLED displays for Apple's first foldable iPhone have begun ahead of its expected launch next year, Korea's ETNews reports. The first foldable iPhone's displays are being produced by Samsung Display, who are establishing a production line dedicated to the upcoming Apple device its A3 factory in Asan, Chungcheongnam-do. The production line will make displays exclusively...
apple tv 4k new orange

New Apple TV Expected Later This Year With These New Features

Saturday July 12, 2025 3:09 pm PDT by
A new Apple TV is expected to be released later this year, and a handful of new features and changes have been rumored for the device. Below, we recap what to expect from the next Apple TV, according to rumors. Rumors Faster Wi-Fi Support The next Apple TV will be equipped with Apple's own combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He said the chip supports ...
iphone 16 pro pro max

iPhone 17 Pro Models With BOE Displays Will Be Sold in China Only

Thursday July 10, 2025 11:59 pm PDT by
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max models with displays made by BOE will be sold exclusively in China, according to a new report. Last week, it emerged that Chinese display manufacturer BOE was aggressively ramping up its OLED production capacity for future iPhone models as part of a plan to recapture a major role in Apple's supply chain. Now, tech news aggregator Jukan Choi reports...

Top Rated Comments

duffman9000 Avatar
102 months ago
Yeah, it’s been garbage in and garbage out for years and now Apple wants us to forget that?
Score: 49 Votes (Like | Disagree)
falainber Avatar
102 months ago
Improving Siri's voice is a good thing but it's much lower on the priority list than making it smarter.
Score: 49 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Menopause Avatar
102 months ago
I would be glad if a dog barked at me in place of Siri's "natural voice" if it were 10% more intelligent than what Siri is today. The most pathetic piece of crap ever maintained by Apple.



Score: 39 Votes (Like | Disagree)
nope7308 Avatar
102 months ago
Siri is the result of believing your own hype. I'll just leave it at that.
Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)
desmond2046 Avatar
102 months ago
Whenever my friends tell me how scary AI is and how it is going to destroy the human beings, I tell them to try Siri.
Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)
AngerDanger Avatar
102 months ago
Apple wants Siri to serve as an automated friend that can help people do more.
Mission accomplished. I can't count how many times I've been chillin' with my friends and having a personal discussion, which tends to go a bit like:

"I get the strangest feeling Steve is just using Sharon as a sort of ego boost. You know what I mean?"

"I don't know what 'I get the strangest feeling Steve is just using Sharon as a sort of ego boost. You know what I mean?' means, but I can search the web for it."

Ahaha, we're such nutters!
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)