Siri needs to get a lot smarter, and quickly Apple's voice assistant is being left in the dust by its competitorsHello from CES in Las Vegas!
During that trip, I used Siri more than I have in a long time — and it was an absolutely dreadful experience.
It’s mostly okay, but this journey drove it home for me: Apple is falling significantly behind in the voice assistant race.
Siri was one of the first voice assistants to be available on smartphones.
Google’s voice assistant has its stuff buttoned up tight, too.
Google is removing 17 “underutilized” features in Google Assistant to focus on “quality and reliability,” the company announced on Thursday.
The news comes as Google is laying off hundreds of employees in its Google Assistant, hardware and other divisions.
Setting or using media alarms, music alarms, or radio alarms on Google Assistant enabled devices.
You can use Google Assistant to search for recipes across the web and YouTube.
Using App Launcher in Google Assistant driving mode on Google Maps to read and send messages, make calls, and control media.
The affected divisions include voice-activated Google Assistant as part of the knowledge and information product team restructuring; and the Devices and Services PA (DSPA) team that manages Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit hardware.
Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
The report also mentioned that Google will now have one core hardware engineering team instead of separate teams working on Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.
Separately, the company has also let go of people working on the Google Assistant team, as reported by Semafor.
Last year, Google had rolling layoffs in different teams including the Waze mapping service in June, its recruiting team in September, and its news division in October.
The German automaker announced Monday at CES 2024 in Las Vegas plans to add an AI-powered chatbot into all Volkswagen models equipped with its IDA voice assistant.
The AI-based chatbot, which is based on software company Cerence’s Chat Pro product, will roll out in the second quarter, starting with Europe.
For now, Volkswagen models in the United States won’t have the feature.
The voice assistant is activated with the “Hello IDA” wake word or by pressing the button on the steering wheel.
The response will come through the IDA voice assistant so drivers may not even know when ChatGPT is and is not in use.
Nabla has been working on an AI copilot for doctors and other medical staff.
Nabla then uses a large language model refined with medical data and health-related conversations to identify the important data points in the consultation — medical vitals, drug names, pathologies, etc.
The company uses a combination of an off-the-shelf speech-to-text API from Microsoft Azure and its own speech-to-text model (a refined model based on the open-source Whisper model).
Once the LLM has processed the transcript, Nabla de-pseudonymizes the output.
However, doctors can give their approval and ask for the patient consent to share medical notes with Nabla so that they can be used to correct transcription errors.
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