Apple reportedly intends to change trigger phrase for "Siri" voice assistant

Apple reportedly wants to swap the "Hey Siri" trigger phrase for just "Siri" for the activation of the voice assistant function.

As the tech website The Verge reported citing Bloomberg, Apple has been working on this feature for the past several months and is expected to roll the new function out next year or in 2024.

The tech giant will have to put in a “significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work,” to get the feature to function properly, as the voice assistant will need to understand the single short word in multiple accents and dialects. The current, two-word trigger phrase, “Hey Siri,” increases the chances of the program picking up on it.

The publication argues, that switching to a single wake word could help Apple keep up with Amazon’s Alexa, which allows users to activate the smart assistant by just using “Alexa” instead of “Hey Alexa.” It would also put Siri one step ahead of Google Assistant, which requires the “Ok Google” or “Hey Google” phrases to activate it. Even Microsoft already made the shift from “Hey Cortana” to “Cortana” on smart speakers before they shut down the voice assistant in 2021.