The research was conducted by Amel Bourdoucen and Janne Lindqvist at Aalto University in Finland.

The two experts said most of the existing research focuses on third-party apps for Apple devices, while not much has been done on privacy issues in first-party apps like Safari and Siri.

The purpose of this study is mainly 3 points:

Investigating how much data Apple’s own apps collect

Where is this data sent?

Assessing whether average users can figure out Apple’s privacy settings

Bourdoucen and Janne Lindqvist don’t question Apple’s technological prowess, but think a cluttered user interface undermines Apple’s reputation for privacy.

Part of the interview is as follows:

Our work shows that users may disable a default application, only to later discover that the disabled setting does not behave as expected.

Our findings indicate that users are unable to properly configure the privacy settings required by default applications. Additionally, we found that some default application configurations can even reduce trust in family relationships.

The researchers criticized the data collection of Apple apps like Safari and Siri, where the data is sent, how users (or cannot) disable data tracking, and how Apple provides users with privacy options.

The report takes the Siri voice assistant as an example. While Mac users can choose not to enable Siri, the service will still run in the background, collecting data from other apps to provide suggestions.

To completely disable Siri, Apple users must find privacy-related options in five different submenus in the Settings app.

Apple’s own working documentation on privacy settings is also imperfect. It doesn’t mention every privacy option, doesn’t explain how user data is processed, and doesn’t highlight whether settings are enabled or disabled.

The report states that Apple’s privacy settings document is written in legalese, which means that the average user has no interest in reading it in full, and even if it does, it is largely unable to understand the corresponding meaning.

The post Apple’s App Privacy Survey Reveals Need for Enhanced Transparency appeared first on TechGoing.

▲ Image source Tech_Reve’s post on the X platform

The first products are expected to be unveiled at WWDC 2024 in iOS/iPadOS 18 and macOS 15, and Apple is also planning to make the improved Siri a “staple feature” of the iPhone 16 model.

Tech_Reve also claims that Apple, like Samsung, is focusing on running on the device side of the device, while working with the cloud to implement relevant AI services, because AI runs locally with faster response times, doesn’t require a network connection, and is more private.

▲ Source Tech_Reve’s posting on X platform

It is found that the foreign media The Information, Haitong International Securities Company analyst Jeff Pu, Bloomberg Mark Gurman and others also believe that Apple will be the earliest to launch in WWDC24 based on the big language model Siri assistant, the new version of Siri can be based on the user’s natural voice commands, automatically perform a variety of complicated The new version of Siri can automatically perform a variety of complex multi-step tasks based on the user’s natural voice commands.

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The post Apple is revamping Siri with big language model, expected in iOS 18 and macOS 15 appeared first on TechGoing.

In a recent issue of its “Power On” newsletter, Mark Gurman said that Apple is working on a way for Siri to understand and respond to commands using the single word “Siri” as a trigger word, without the user having to say “Hey, Siri.

This may seem like a small change, but it’s actually a big technical challenge that requires a lot of AI training and underlying engineering work. The complexity is that Siri has to be able to recognize the single word “Siri” in many different accents, and using two words “Hey, Siri” increases the likelihood that the system will correctly capture the signal. The change will bring Siri closer to Amazon’s voice assistant, which can be triggered simply by a command that begins with “Alexa.

Mark Gurman added that Apple is also working on deeper integration of Siri with third-party apps and services to provide better assistance. Improvements to Siri are expected to roll out in 2023 or 2024, meaning it could be announced as early as this summer at WWDC alongside iOS 17, an event expected to focus on Apple’s mixed reality headset.

The post Mark Gurman: In the future, just say Siri to wake up Apple’s voice assistant appeared first on TechGoing.

Victoria BC radio host received a call from a visually impaired person named Gail on the live call-in show Tech Talk.

She said that after updating iOS / iPadOS 16.4.1, when using Siri to set the calendar for the 31st, it automatically sets the calendar to the 30th, and cannot be changed by Siri voice command.

It is learned from a follow-up report that CFAX 1070 radio host Alan Perry then tried a variety of ways to include the week element when creating the 31st event, but ultimately it didn’t work.

The post Bug in iOS / iPadOS 16.4.1: Siri can’t set the 31st calendar appeared first on TechGoing.

Image source Pexels

The report is based on “interviews with more than three dozen former employees of Apple’s AI and machine learning teams.” The New York Times published a similar report earlier this month, explaining how Siri was built on a “clumsy” database, leading to Siri updating “basic functions” that required ” weeks” time.

A major problem facing the Siri team is employee turnover. Apple has lost three Siri engineers who joined Google: Srinivasan Venkatachary, Steven Baker and Anand Shukla, The Information reports. The three employees originally joined Apple in 2019, when Apple acquired their startup, Laserlike. The three engineers had been working on the Siri search feature, but decided that Google was a better place to work on large language models (LLMs), the technology behind Google Bard and ChatGPT, among others. Google was so eager to get the three engineers, “that its CEO Sundar Pichai lobbied for the team himself,” the report said. On Apple’s side, CEO Tim Cook also “tried to convince them to stay,” but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Inside Apple, “Siri is still ridiculed by employees,” the report said. At one point, the team working on Apple’s headsets was so frustrated with Siri that it considered “building other ways” to control the headsets with voice technology.

In addition, one of the bottlenecks facing Siri is that Apple’s “top brass” are conservative about Siri making major mistakes in answering questions, which may lead to negative press and negative impact on the platform.

The post New report says even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future appeared first on TechGoing.

The patent, titled “Assistant that can recommend contacts,” aims to make Siri, the voice assistant on iPhone and iPad, smarter and better able to understand users’ call requests.

Apple said the current Siri can respond to the user’s call voice command, the actual scenario in which the user will use a nickname, or only use a small number of contact fields such as first name, last name, and similar pronunciation of different, will not be able to correctly identify the situation.

It is learned from the patent, Apple conceived an improved contact calling system that can handle the user’s natural language, through the association between name references and contact identifiers, more intelligent and more accurate to determine the contact.

The post New patent for Apple’s voice assistant Siri: Calling contacts is more efficient and smarter appeared first on TechGoing.

Currently, invoking Siri by pressing a button or using the “Hey Siri” voice command results in an animated sphere appearing at the bottom of the screen. While the virtual assistant listens, the sphere remains overlaid on the screen, and any details related to the request appear as cards at the top or bottom of the screen, with background content dimmed.

Moving the Siri interface to Dynamic Island may keep the screen content in full view. Originally, the Siri interface would take up the entire screen whenever a user interacted with the virtual assistant, but Apple switched to a more compact interface in iOS 14, making it the default choice.

According to the anonymous source, Apple “may use the Dynamic Island version of Siri it is currently testing” and that “more” notifications will appear on the Dynamic Island interface. Apple is expected to expand the “Dynamic Island” soft and hard design to all four iPhone 15 models this year.

The post Apple iOS 17 is testing the Siri interaction interface on Dynamic Island appeared first on TechGoing.

The “Siri Natural Language Generation” framework was found in the code, presumably to enhance the personal assistant’s natural language capabilities. It’s just not clear how different it is from the existing Siri.

The report part of the content as follows:

"In the latest tvOS 16.4 Beta, Apple enabled a new framework called "Siri Natural Language Generation". Current code tests show that the framework only allows Siri to generate jokes on Apple TV. The company is also experimenting with how language generation can be used for countdowns."

9to5Mac has only found the code in tvOS 16.4 Beta 4 so far, but presumably Apple has included similar (and inactive) code in iOS, HomePod OS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Previously, Apple engineers, including members of the Siri team, were said to be testing the concept of language generation “on a weekly basis” in response to the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT.

The post Apple is improving the Siri voice assistant, and Siri Natural Language Generation appeared first on TechGoing.