‘Hey Siri’ To ‘Siri’, Apple Likely To Change Its Voice Assistant Command

Washington: The ‘Hey Siri’ command for Apple might change to just ‘Siri.’

‘Hey Siri’ is the quickest way to launch Siri on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and HomePod. The company is working on an initiative to drop the “Hey” in the trigger phrase so that a user only needs to say “Siri”—along with a command, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Apple’s been working on this feature for the past several months and is expected to roll it out next year or in 2024. However, in order for the functionality to work effectively, Apple would need to invest a “significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work,” since the smart assistant will need to grasp the single wake word in numerous accents and dialects, the report added.

The current, two-word trigger phrase, ‘Hey Siri’, increases the chance of Siri picking up on it. Switching to a single wake phrase might help Siri compete with Amazon’s Alexa, which already allows users to activate the smart assistant with ‘Alexa’ rather than ‘Hey Alexa’.

It would also put Siri ahead of Google Assistant, which requires the ‘Ok Google’ or ‘Hey Google’ phrases to activate, though users do not have to repeat the wake word when saying back-to-back requests.

Before shutting down its voice assistant last year, even Microsoft had shifted from ‘Hey Cortana’ to ‘Cortana’ on smart speakers.