As suggested by previous reports, Apple has brought a big change to its voice assistant Siri that can be now triggered by just saying "Siri" instead of "Hey Siri". Announced on June 5, on the first day of the annual WWDC conference, this is similar to what retail giant Amazon has done with its virtual assistant Alexa, which can be triggered simply by beginning a command with "Alexa".
The smarter and smaller "Siri" command will be supported by all iPhones and iPads that can run iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, the tech giant mentioned. For the Mac and AirPods, however, the company says the feature will be limited to Macs with Apple silicon and the second-gen AirPods Pro. The new just "Siri" command is one of several new features introduced by the Cupertino-based tech giant across iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. The software updates will be available as developer betas starting June 5, the company said and will be publicly released later this year.
According to previous reports, Apple's employees had been testing the change in trigger words to collect adequate training data.
As mentioned earlier, Apple was supposed to drop "Hey Siri" trigger phrase this year at WWDC 2023. According to news agency Bloomberg, Apple users would be able to trigger Apple's smart assistant Siri along with a simple "Siri" command instead of "Hey Siri", in a big update to the virtual assistant. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, in a tweet, mentioned that the change to the Siri trigger phrase may be among at the tech giant's announcement .
"Everyone is asking about Siri, AI and WWDC on Monday. One item I haven’t mentioned in a while has been a major project to drop the “Hey” from “Hey Siri.” I’d look out for that possibility next week," Gurman had posted on Twitter.