Apple aims to make Siri smarter

If you wonder why your iPhone’s digital assistant Siri isn’t smarter, you may be in luck. Apple is making moves that many believe may help make Siri more capable, while maintain Apple’s commitment to users’ privacy.

This week, Apple announced it has acquired the artificial intelligence startup Perceptio, according to Forbes. Unlike other firms’ smart phone technologies, Perceptio aims to enhance the phone’s intelligence without using cloud-based assistance.

By keeping the system on the phone, Apple says user data can remain private. Perceptio founders Zak Stone and Nicholas Pinto say that their technology is based on insights from pattern recognition and the latest brain science, enabling powerful computer programming to work on a handheld device.

In another recent buy, Apple acquired the British startup VocalIQ, which developed a proprietary system for enhancing voice-recognition. Together with the Perceptio technology, which includes facial recognition software, analysts suspect that Apple is looking to significantly upgrade Siri, to better compete with other company’s digital assistants, such as Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Now.

Those companies’ systems have used the power of cloud-based computing to create faster, more effective digital assistance. But with the improved facial and voice recognition from the two acquisitions, Apple expects iPhone users may soon find that Siri seems much smarter.