Siri Might Soon Start Whispering To You In Public

It is no secret that a lot of companies believe that machine learning and AI is future of smartphones. Big tech companies like Apple, Google and Samsung have already invested big in Artificial Intelligence and have their own AI assistant in their smartphones. One such assistant is Apple’s own Siri. Siri, just like many other assistants can play music, set reminders and make a shopping list according to your text or voice commands.

But, it can get a bit embarrassing if you’re in a public transport talking to your phone and this robot is responding to you in full volume. And no matter how much you whisper, Siri responds in the default volume. This new patent from Apple might solve this issue, and make Siri smart enough to understand when you’re whispering.

First spotted by Gizmodo, the patent details a feature that would enable Siri to discern when a user is whispering to it and, in turn, offer up a response in a silent whisper. Alex Rudnicky, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, told Gizmodo:

The technology could come out any time because the component technologies are pretty straightforward. The ways that they’re doing this is kind of textbook speech processing but, working up an algorithm to decide when to go into “whisper mode” would be more complicated. I can’t really say why nobody’s come up with this solution. But once you hear it, it sounds really reasonable. Why not?

This feature won’t make someone start using Siri every day and neither will this feature make it into an ad for the next iPhone but, it will surely make other companies strive to make their AI assistants smarter.