Apple's Siri related employment is at a record high, Siri's upgrade aim

Apple's smart speaker which was only released in some areas of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia on February 9, 2018 "HomePod". At the core of such HomePod is "Siri" of speech recognition assistant, you can speak only from speaking to music, have news read aloud, have traffic information taught, weather is taught, task management You can go and do a variety of actions, such as having your schedule be registered as a reminder. In order to extend the function of Siri, it is clear that Apple employs many occupations related to Siri's development.

Apple is hiring hundreds of engineers to make Siri smarter | Thinknum Media
https://media.thinknum.com/articles/apple-is-now-hiring-hundreds-of-siri-focused-positions/


Report: Apple ramping up Siri improvement efforts as hiring hits new all-time high | 9to 5Mac
https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/31/apple-hiring-for-siri-spike/

According to Apple employment information tracked by Thinknum Media, it includes the word "Siri"Open positionHas increased sharply by 24% monthly in the past few weeks. The number of open positions including Apple's word "Siri" hired in March 2018 is 161 people.

The graph below is a graph of the number of open position employees, including the word "Siri" from 2016 to March 2018. I can understand that recruitment of job seekers is accelerating from the middle of February 2018.


The vast majority of the open positions employed by Apple are Santa Clara Valley with new headquarters, with 154 people employed as software engineers by job type, 1 employee employed in design, 1 product management related There are 3 people, 3 related people in information systems.

The contents of the work of people employed as a software engineer are said to be roughly divided into five types. From "Siri iOS Engineer" it seems that there are things such as "infrastructure engineer", "machine learning engineer", "natural language processing engineer" that would require more specialized skills.

byHelloquence

Apple's Siri is obviously lagging behind speech recognition assistants such as Google's "Google Assistant" which has been growing strong in recent years, Amazon's "Alexa", Microsoft's "Cortana". At the appearance of HomePod, Siri, which is a key part of the brain, was criticized as "lacking in smartness" while being praised for the high performance as a speaker.

It is difficult to figure out a lot from Apple's employment information but it is clear that Apple employs many engineers for Siri development and expects to evolve more smarter and brush up rivals It will be.