Siri (/ˈsɪəri/ ⓘ SEER-ee, backronym: Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) is a digital assistant purchased, developed, and popularized by Apple Inc., which is included in the iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, audioOS, and visionOS operating systems.

[1][2] It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Internet services.

With the release of iOS 11, Apple updated Siri's voice and added support for follow-up questions, language translation, and additional third-party actions.

The reports concerned Siri's limited set of features, "bad" voice recognition, and undeveloped service integrations as causing trouble for Apple in the field of artificial intelligence and cloud-based services; the basis for the complaints reportedly due to stifled development, as caused by Apple's prioritization of user privacy and executive power struggles within the company.

[7] The speech recognition system uses sophisticated machine learning techniques, including convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory.

[10] The initial Siri prototype was implemented using the Active platform, a joint project between the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International and the Vrai Group at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

As a beta tester explained, this current version of Siri with Apple Intelligence is still in the early development stages, so users shouldn't expect a vastly different experience.

"[19] Citing growing pressure, Bennett revealed her role as Siri in October, and her claim was confirmed by Ed Primeau, an American audio forensics expert.

[19] The original British male voice was provided by Jon Briggs, a former technology journalist and for 12 years narrated for the hit BBC quiz show The Weakest Link.

[34] A few days later, Troughton-Smith, working with an anonymous person nicknamed "Chpwn", managed to fully hack Siri, enabling its full functionalities on iPhone 4 and iPod Touch devices.

[51] In September 2014, Apple added the ability for users to speak "Hey Siri" to enable the assistant without the requirement of physically handling the device.

[52] In September 2015, the "Hey Siri" feature was updated to include individualized voice recognition, a presumed effort to prevent non-owner activation.

[53][54] With the announcement of iOS 10 in June 2016, Apple opened up limited third-party developer access to Siri through a dedicated application programming interface (API).

[55][56] In iOS 11, Siri is able to handle follow-up questions, supports language translation, and opens up to more third-party actions, including task management.

[61] In the public beta versions of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma, Apple added support for bilingual queries to Siri.

"[67] Google's executive chairman and former chief, Eric Schmidt, conceded that Siri could pose a competitive threat to the company's core search business.

[72]In January 2016, Fast Company reported that, in then-recent months, Siri had begun to confuse the word "abortion" with "adoption", citing "health experts" who stated that the situation had "gotten worse."

Before Apple bought it, Siri was on the road to being a robust digital assistant that could do many things, and integrate with many services—even though it was being built by a startup with limited funds and people.

After Apple bought Siri, the giant company seemed to treat it as a backwater, restricting it to doing only a few, slowly increasing number of tasks, like telling you the weather, sports scores, movie and restaurant listings, and controlling the device's functions.

Instead, it shows you a web search result, even when you're not in a position to read it.In October 2016, Bloomberg reported that Apple had plans to unify the teams behind its various cloud-based services, including a single campus and reorganized cloud computing resources aimed at improving the processing of Siri's queries,[82] although another report from The Verge, in June 2017, once again called Siri's voice recognition "bad.

"[83] In June 2017, The Wall Street Journal published an extensive report on the lack of innovation with Siri following competitors' advancement in the field of voice assistants.

"[3][84] In July 2019, a then-anonymous whistleblower and former Apple contractor Thomas le Bonniec said that Siri regularly records some of its users' conversations even when it was not activated.

[85] In August 2019, Apple apologized, halted the Siri grading program, and said that it plans to resume "later this fall when software updates are released to [its] users".

[87] iOS 13.2, released in October 2019, introduced the ability to opt out of the grading program and to delete all the voice recordings that Apple has stored on its servers.

In May 2020, Thomas le Bonniec revealed himself as the whistleblower and sent a letter to European data protection regulators, calling on them to investigate Apple's "past and present" use of Siri recordings.

According to an article from The Conversation, Siri "reinforces the role of women as secondary and submissive to men" due to the fact that the default is a soft, female voice.

[99] Although Apple now offers a larger variety of voices with different accents and languages, this original narrative perpetuates the idea of women servicing men.

Additionally, Siri may misinterpret certain accents or dialects, particularly those spoken by people from marginalized racial or ethnic backgrounds, making it less accessible to these groups.

According to an article from The Scientific American, Claudia Lloreda explains that non-native English speakers have to "adapt our way of speaking to interact with speech-recognition technologies.

"[100] Furthermore, due to repetitive "learnings" from a larger user base, Siri may unintentionally produce a Western perspective, limiting representation and furthering biases in everyday interactions.