No more ‘Hey Siri’ on iPhones; Apple may soon simplify voice assistant’s trigger phrase

Apple is planning to change the “Hey Siri” trigger phrase to just “Siri”, according to a Bloomberg report. The company’s current two phrase trigger for its voice assistant, ‘Hey Siri’ sometimes accidentally activates the assistant on a different device, like the HomePods. With this change, the company expects such accidents to die down. It would also speed up back-to-back requests from the user.

Apple has also redesigned the Siri interface on the Apple TV as a part of tvOS 16.1.

This change would make Apple's voice assistant command similar to Amazon's Alexa which responds to just 'Alexa' as a command and Microsoft's Cortana as well.

As per the Bloomberg report, Apple has been working on this change for several months and is expected to roll it out either by next year or in 2024. 

Though it may seem like a small change for Apple engineers, the report added that the initiative is a “technical challenge that requires a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work,” to get the feature working properly.

Meanwhile, Apple is further working towards integrating Siri into third-party apps and services, improving its ability to understand and process users’ requests.

In March last year, Apple added two new voices to Siri and moved away from gender specification of the voice. This was seen as Apple's way of supporting the LGBTQ+ community. 

“We’re excited to introduce two new Siri voices for English speakers and the option for Siri users to select the voice they want when they set up their device," Apple had said in a statement.

Siri was not always a part of the iPhone. It was developed through the SRI-led Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project within DARPA’s Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program and later acquired by Apple. Apple first introduced it in 2010 as an app and later integrated it into the iPhone 4S in 2011.