Apple's Eddy Cue has been in charge of Siri since software chief Scott Forestall left the company in 2012. Now, the executive has handed Siri over to Craig Federighi -- and it might be a bigger deal than your usual shuffling of responsibilities. See, while Cue heads Apple Music, Pay, iCloud and iTunes, Federighi is in charge of developing iOS and MacOS. As Reuters noted, handing the voice assistant over to the operating system chief could mean that Apple is looking to integrate it more deeply into both platforms. The tech titan has been giving Siri deeper access to both iOS and MacOS for a while anyway: the voice assistant made its way to Macs with Sierra, you can use it to control third-party apps like Uber and it will soon be able to add events to your calendar if you sign up for them on Safari.

SAN FRANCISCO – Hi folks, and welcome back to "Is Apple Building A Car," the game where reading between the lines is more important than focusing on the road. Our Wednesday installment features media reports that the iPhone maker -- which insists its so-called Project Titan is a fantasy – is in investment talks with British supercar builder McLaren and Bay Area electric motorcycle startup Lit Motors. These discussions, were reported by the Financial Times and The New York Times respectively, were leaked by anonymous sources and immediately denied by all the companies concerned. But both plays make sense. Regular players of this game will know that as a notoriously secretive outfit, rumor denial is standard operating procedure at Apple.

Steven Levy has published an in-depth article about Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts, after meeting with senior executives Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, and two Siri scientists at the company's headquarters. Apple provided Levy with a closer look at how machine learning is deeply integrated into Apple software and services, led by Siri, which the article reveals has been powered by a neural-net based system since 2014. Apple said the backend change greatly improved the personal assistant's accuracy. "This was one of those things where the jump was so significant that you do the test again to make sure that somebody didn't drop a decimal place," says Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of internet software and services.Alex Acero, who leads the Siri speech team at Apple, said Siri's error rate has been lowered by more than a factor of two in many cases. "The error rate has been cut by a factor of two in all the languages, more than a factor of two in many cases," says Acero. "That's mostly due to deep learning and the way we have optimized it -- not just the algorithm itself but in the context of the whole end-to-end product."Acero