Siri Update: Apple Working On Customizable, Voice-Specific Alternative For ‘Hey Siri’ Command

When using Siri, users can give commands the digital assistant to do many tasks. However, the mechanism by which Google Assistant’s rival responds to voice commands is proven to be flawed. For one thing, Siri is designed to respond to commands given by anyone, so people aside from the owner of the device can ask the AI assistant to do stuff, including accessing personal data. Fortunately, Apple appears to be working on a solution already.

A new patent application by the Cupertino giant contains details on how Samsung’s biggest rival is planning to make Siri more secure. The document basically presents information on how Siri could be updated to have the ability to respond to a specific voice only. Hence, the feature will make the digital assistant receptive to a specific person, ruling out the possibility of having other people access the person’s iOS device, as first reported by Patently Apple.

The new feature will require users to register a specific word as the “lexical trigger” of Siri. At present, consumers only use “Hey Siri” to wake up the AI assistant. With this customizable lexical trigger, Siri will respond to the specific word that the owner of the device registered. This is expected to work simultaneously with the voice-detection technology mentioned earlier. Therefore, in order for Siri to work, the system would need to match the voice and the lexical trigger to the ones stored in the digital assistant’s database.

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Should Siri fail to match the voice of the speaker to the one stored in the system, users can still unlock their iPhone or iPad through Touch ID or a passcode, as pointed out by 9To5Mac. With all of these technologies combined, Apple is indeed looking to provide its customers with top-notch security and protection from hackers.

Apart from the security this new Siri feature would be providing, another upside here is how users could now assign specific lexical triggers for every iOS device they have. As stated in the patent, the new feature could minimize the chances of triggering all electronic devices with digital assistants in one room. Assigning a different lexical trigger to each device is expected to do the trick.