How Apple’s Siri Learns a New Language

By Chris Lange Updated Jan 12, 2:07PM EST · Published Mar 9, 11:20AM EST

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How Apple’s Siri Learns a New Language — © courtesy of Apple Inc.

[cnxvideo id=”508517″ placement=”ros”]When comparing personal assistants, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) stands well above the competition of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) in one key area: language. Although most of these assistants are similar in many ways, language is a dividing factor, yielding a larger target audience.

Apple’s Siri can support 21 languages across 36 country dialects. Google’s Assistant is only capable of understanding four languages, while Alexa from Amazon only knows two. Even Cortana from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) only supports eight languages.

With Apple’s next update, iOS 10.3, the company is introducing another language, Shanghainese, further expanding its stranglehold on this field.

Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple, illustrated the process of how Siri learns a new language in a recent interview with Reuters.

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Siri begins learning a new language after Apple brings in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, a language model is built that tries to predict word sequences.

The next step in the process involves Apple’s “dictation mode,” a text-to-speech translator in the new language. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

Accordingly, when enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been recorded to play Siri in a new language, it is released with answers to what are expected to be the most common questions. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.

Shares of Apple were last seen at $138.60 on Thursday, with a consensus analyst price target of $142.46 and a 52-week trading range of $89.47 to $140.28.

Alphabet shares were trading at $855.90. The stock has a 52-week range of $672.66 to $867.00 and a consensus price target of $988.95.

Amazon was trading at $852.38, in a 52-week range of $538.58 to $860.86. The consensus analyst target is $942.32.

Microsoft shares were last seen at $64.91. The consensus price target is $69.48, and the 52-week range is $48.04 to $65.91.

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About the Author Chris Lange →

Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics.

Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications.

A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.