Compared to Google Assistant or even Amazon’s Alexa, Siri, despite it being around longer, doesn’t feel quite as robust or as responsive despite Apple’s work over the years. In fact a report from earlier this month even suggested that Apple could be looking to give Siri a dramatic makeover to make it more competitive.
Whether or not that is true remains to be seen, but it is clear that Apple is looking to improve on the digital assistant. This is evidenced in a recent report in which based on job listings, Apple is looking to hire as many as 142 people for Siri-related work. Apparently this is twice as many compared to the previous year, suggesting that the rumors of Siri getting an overhaul could be true to a certain extent.
This shouldn’t be too surprising either because with the launch of the HomePod, and as much as Apple would like to claim that the speakers are more focused on sound quality, they are usually compared with the Amazon Echo and Google Home, both of which have more “smarts” when it comes to connected objects.
Exactly what these new hirings mean remains to be seen because in the previous report, it was suggested that the current situation at Apple is where the company has no clear vision of what Siri should be. Unless Apple has already defined a vision, hiring more people won’t necessarily make it better, but we suppose we’ll just have to wait and find out.