Apple Is Equipping Siri With Lip Reading Skills So You Can Turn Off The Always-on Mic

Apple Inc. AAPL has filed a patent for teaching Siri how to read lips so it doesn't have to constantly listen in with the microphone for commands like "Siri" or "Hey, Siri".

What Happened: Apple's latest patent filing reveals that it is trying to teach Siri how to get smarter by detecting and understanding the motions of its users to be more accurate about what they are trying to say.

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"Data is received from a motion sensor, for instance, recording the motion of a user as the user utters a spoken input," Apple said in its filing, describing how the technology would work. It also mentioned the use of an accelerometer and a gyroscope, both of which are already present in iPhones.

Reinforcements For Siri: While Apple seems to be pulling a page out of 1968 epic "2001: A Space Odyssey", it might actually need reinforcements from motion detection technology to make Siri more reliable at understanding voice commands.

"Voice control systems can result in false positive responses," the filing says.

Motion detection would give Siri an additional data point to understand the user's commands. Apple says an always-on microphone also consumes power even when the user is not using voice commands.

"Continuously detecting and processing audio data expends power and processing capacity even when the user is not actively using voice control," Apple said in its patent filing as one of the reasons behind using motion detection.

It adds that motion detection would be more power efficient, instead. "Motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes can detect these motions while expending relatively little power compared to audio sensors such as microphones," Apple says.

Not requiring always-on microphones would also be a positive when it comes to user privacy, but it remains to be seen how far in the development cycle this feature is.

Image source – Shutterstock

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