Siri’s Voice Might Sound a Lot More Human with the Release of iOS 10

Siri’s voice might be benefitting from some much-needed improvements when iOS 10 launches — which is pegged for sometime in September.

While Siri is certainly a useful feature, and was arguably the first “smart assistant” to be featured on an operating system, she isn’t without her faults — including a robotic voice that was quite often poked fun at, and sometimes sketchy command interpretation. To remedy this, Apple is reportedly going to implement new machine learning technology into Siri’s system, coinciding with the release of iOS 10, according to AppleInsider.

Apple had previously switched Siri to a deep neural network back in July of 2014. This change upgraded Siri with learning technology. The company never publicized the switch, however, until today. The tech giant hopes that this machine learning will eventually smooth out Siri’s responses, and eventually make her sound more human — even though her voice is still stitched together from different recordings.

In a Backchannel interview, Apple executives stated that the company has “a lot” of people working on machine learning technology, even though there is currently no official department for the tech. Of course, while on the surface it is seemingly unrelated, this news might just coincide with another story that recently made headlines.

Just yesterday, reports broke of a phone call Barbra Streisand made to Apple CEO Tim Cook. That phone call reportedly concerned Siri’s incorrect pronunciation of Streisand’s last name — in short, Streisand wanted Apple to fix it, and Apple agreed. And in a recent NPR interview, Streisand casually dropped that the update with the Siri fix would be rolled out September 30.

This late September release date didn’t exactly coincide with the numerous rumors that iOS 10 would be available much earlier in the month — and news outlets theorized that it was a mistake on Streisand’s part. But the possibility now is that the September 30 update is a patch for iOS 10 that includes — at the very least — a Siri fix for Streisand’s name.

The interesting part is to try and guess what other Siri improvements Apple might be sneaking in to a possible iOS 10 patch. We’ll just have to wait and see.

What kind of improvements would you like to be seen made to Siri?
Or does she work perfectly fine for you and your needs? Let us know in the comments below!

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]