How Apple personalizes Siri without hoovering up your data

Instead, it relies primarily on a technique called federated learning, Apple's head of privacy, Julien Freudiger, told an audience at the Neural Processing Information Systems conference on December 8. Federated learning is a privacy-preserving machine-learning method that was first introduced by Google in 2017. It allows Apple to train different copies of a speaker recognition model across all its users' devices, using only the audio data available locally. It then sends just the updated models back to a central server to be combined into a master model. In this way, raw audio of users' Siri requests never leaves their iPhones and iPads, but the assistant continuously gets better at identifying the right speaker.