Apple hiring for Siri AI team hits all-time high with focus on natural-language processing

In June, we found a trend in Apple's ($NASDAQ:AAPL) hiring data that indicated the company was getting serious about making its digital assistant, Siri, smarter. At the time, we saw a jump in open positions with the term "Siri" in their titles, which led us to predict that Apple was setting its sights on building a vast team of engineers and scientists to bring Siri up to par with other digital assistants from Google and Amazon. Just a few days after our story, Apple poached Google's former head of search and artificial intelligence to kick Siri's smarts into high gear. But Apple isn't done; it seems the company is continuing to build its team of artificial intelligence engineering teams to bring Siri's capabilities up to speed. Of the 167 open positions on September 24, the most common titles -- at least those that match perfectly -- are for Software Engineers, with 6 openings. Of course, software engineers could be working on anything, but almost as common are NLP Research Scientists.