During the last year Apple bought VocalIQ, a small company whose headquarters was in Cambridge, Great Britain, and in the not too distant future the technology will be integrated into Crab to offer a completely different experience of using the virtual assistant.
The artificial intelligence developed by VocalIQ is capable of understanding complex questions asked by users, even following a series of questions and connecting them, or having a conversation with users.
For example, the artificial intelligence of VocalIQ is able to provide results to a user who is looking for a place to find a certain type of food, free Wi-Fi, but also free parking, the rate of correct results offered by the Apple system being 90 %, while Google Now, Siri or Cortana only reached 20%.
Using an Amazon program, the people from VocalIQ tested the artificial intelligence system, before it was bought by Apple, and after 10.000 dialogues with ordinary people, the system managed to practically humiliate Google Now, Siri or Cortana with its rate of correct results on complex questions.
Users asked each AI questions using normal language, not the robotic commands you're used to using with digital assistants. For example, imagine asking a computer to "Find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and WiFi that's kid-friendly." VocalIQ's success rate was over 90%, while Google Now, Siri, and Cortana were only successful about 20% of the time
VocalIQ is much smarter than Siri, but also much more advanced in terms of word recognition, its software being able to dynamically distinguish between the sounds around a user and the words spoken by him, understanding more exactly what what does he say
Basically, the artificial intelligence developed by VocalIQ outside and within Apple will offer a virtual personal assistant, in the true sense of the word, which could be even better than the recently announced Google Assistant which will be available from summer.
VocalIQ's platform is also malleable enough to be programmed for anything you want to do. One example a source gave was teaching it to successfully manage email while a user's phone was in their pocket. In theory, Apple would be able to train Siri to do everything much better using VocalIQ.
It is probably not surprising that Google is in a hurry to bring artificial intelligence systems to the market to improve the experience of Google Now users since Apple has prepared such an important upgrade for Siri.
VocalIQ technology has been in development for several years and it is not known for sure when it will be implemented in Siri, but considering the major battle in the field of personal assistants, I don't think it will be long until we see it launched, but not in Romanian language.
