Siri is known to cut people off midsentence, but there's away to make Siri listen longer. CyberGuy shows you how to customize the wait time. I have a love /hate relationship with Siri. It shouldn't be so complicated and sure shouldn't sound like we need couples counseling. Unfortunately, this dysfunctional relationship I share with my iPhone's virtual assistant is systematic and widespread.

Apple's been on a shopping spree in a bid to make Siri smarter, according to a new report by GlobalData. The market research firm says the tech giant bought more AI companies than anyone else between 2016 and 2020. The second biggest AI acquirer was Irish consultancy Accenture. But the rest of the top five were all based in the US. Google grabbed the third spot on the list, followed by Microsoft and Facebook.

Based in part on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Apple has been able to tune Siri to better understand users based on where they are and what POIs they're more likely to ask about. Apple says machine learning on its own has helped improve automatic speech recognition for general language over the years, but "recognizing named entities, like small local businesses" has proved a performance bottleneck. We decided to improve Siri's ability to recognize names of local POIs by incorporating knowledge of the user's location into our speech recognition system. That's done partly by relying on data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau: We define geo regions based on the combined statistical areas (CSAs) [1] from U.S. Census Bureau. The CSAs consist of adjacent metropolitan areas that are economically and socially linked, as measured by commuting patterns.

For years, Apple has used the stage of its Worldwide Developers Conference to announce upgrades to the Siri personal assistant that would make it more useful. This year's plan, according to a Siri trick Apple has put out there: Siri will be smarter, get a new look and a new voice. Ask Siri to tell you about the WWDC conference, which starts June 4th in San Jose, and you get one of three answers both in audio and written form. It might be all that late night studying I've been doing." If readers feel like they've read this before, welcome to the club.

The first time Alex Acero saw Her, he watched it like a normal person. The second time, he didn't watch the movie at all. Acero, the Apple executive in charge of the tech behind Siri, sat there with his eyes closed, listening to how Scarlett Johansson voiced her artificially intelligent character Samantha. He paid attention to how she talked to Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and how Twombly talked back. Acero was trying to discern what about Samantha could make someone fall in love without ever seeing her.

Apple has been building data centers powered by renewable energy across the US for some time, now, with facilities in North Carolina, Arizona and Reno. The tech company plans to build it's latest data center -- a 400,000 square foot facitlity -- in Waukee, Iowa by 2020. Construction should begin early next year with the resulting center aimed at supporting users of Apple's online services in North America. "Our new data center in Iowa will help serve millions of people across North America who use Siri, iMessage, Apple Music and other Apple services -- all powered by renewable energy," said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a statement. Apple says that the center will add 550 construction and operations jobs in the Des Moines area.

Apple may have started the digital assistant craze with Siri, but it's largely been playing catch-up lately. Specifically, to Google and Mountain View's own Assistant. Now Apple's app has more expressive voices (both male and female, English and British) and in-app translation features. More than that, Siri can act as a task manager of sorts, offering access to banking in the Citi Mobile app, or, for whatever reason, a QR code in WeChat. And going deeper into Apple's low-key focus on AI, Siri's on-device artificial intelligence and contextual learning will offer up a GPS pin when you're messaging about where you're located.

The latest version of Apple's mobile software, iOS 10.3, is out now in public beta form, and while some incoming features like a lost AirPods locator are easy to pick out, other additions may not be so obvious. A new feature in iOS 10.3 lets users send Apple data gathered from iCloud, giving the tech giant the resources to improve its products and services, according to TechCrunch. The feature's description also explicitly names Apple's digital assistant Siri as one of the services that would directly benefit from iCloud Analytics. This feature is coming to light right after it was revealed Apple is a founding member of the Partnership on AI, a consortium of businesses including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that collaborate on advancing and advocating artificial intelligence technology. The partnership - combined with the data potentially available to Apple following the full release of iOS 10.3 - could greatly bolster the iPhone maker's AI development and help Siri stay competitive against the likes of Microsoft's Cortana or Amazon's Alexa.

Google is showing off a new smart-home speaker and a chat service called Allo during its annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple is planning to make Siri smarter by linking it to the vast menu of iOS apps and eventually will deploy the digital assistant on a standalone device similar to Amazon's best-selling Echo, according to a published report. The news, reported Tuesday by tech media site The Information, answers an oft-asked question about why the iPhone-maker seems to be sitting on the sidelines as a growing number of companies, from Google to Siri-offshoot Viv, make big announcements about the coming age of voice-activated machine learning. Citing unnamed sources, the article said Apple was preparing to release a software developer kit, or SDK, that would allow app-makers to allow their products to integrate with Siri. Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference is scheduled for June 13 in San Francisco.

Siri is about to get a lot smarter thank to Carnegie Mellon researcher Russ Salakhutdinov, who announced today that he is joining Apple to lead the company's artificial intelligence efforts. Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my teamhttps://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA Although he's not a household name, Russ Salakhutdinov is one of the biggest deep learning figures in academia. His hiring by Apple comes after the company has been criticized for Siri's weak performance compared to rival digital assistants from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Before working at CMU, Salakhutdinov worked at Toronto University and MIT.