It may be only Tuesday (May 14) but it's already been a big week for virtual voice assistants, with OpenAI unveiling serious sentient conversational skills with GPT-4 Omni (or GPT-4o for short) and Nothing winning the ChatGPT earbuds race.
And now, Denon has just quietly affixed more talking tech to its 2020 Sonos One-rival Denon Home 150, as well as its December 2019 Denon 250 and Denon 350 wireless speakers and Denon Home Soundbar 550. Which virtual voice variant has it added? Er… Siri. And surely, that suggests Denon knows something we don't.
To clarify: Siri is not in a good place right now. TechRadar has not been backwards about coming forwards on this, with our own senior news editor, Mark Wilson, writing "Siri is truly terrible" back in March. And despite his optimism about its rumored iOS 18 reboot (due September 2024), he's not alone; I also lamented that while a hotly-anticipated HomePod with touchscreen would be lovely, Apple's design language has never been the issue – it's next-gen Siri we chiefly need.
Siri was largely ignored at Apple's last WWDC 2023 event, aside from a shortening of the wake-up phrase from ‘Hey Siri’ to ‘Siri’, leading us to think that Apple simply no longer cares about Siri. In truth, we've been moaning for over a year now that Siri is being left behind – and Apple knows it.
Denon, is Siri about to get really good?
On the face of it, Denon's decision to quietly add support for Siri is hardly reason to suggest the New Jersey audio specialist is leveling up its offering to compete with the best smart speakers in the business.
But perhaps Denon knows more than it's letting on about Siri in iOS 18's rumored conversational skills, announced two days ago – especially with Apple's WWDC 2024 event now set for June 10-14.
Although WWDC is the stage Tim Cook's behemoth typically uses to shine a spotlight on incoming software updates and Apple's enviable lineup of gadgetry, we're only expecting iOS 18's developer beta to launch on June 10 (so very few people will actually get to use it over the summer). The public beta usually arrives around a month or so later – and the iOS 18 public release should roll out in mid September.
So, is Siri about to get really good? Signs are actually promising. In early April, Apple researchers unveiled an AI breakthrough that could make Siri much smarter. The paper (entitled 'ReALM: Reference Resolution As Language Modeling') contains info from the Cupertino giant on how Apple's own AI system could consider both what's on your device’s screen and the tasks you're performing in the foreground and the background, as response stimuli to better understand your queries.
Denon's Home speaker lineup doesn't include large screens, but the device you use to control them (via the Denon Heos app) almost certainly does. And considering Denon's Home speakers already offer Alexa built-in and Google Assistant (although that's another story, with Google Gemini effectively replacing it – see also Google's original virtual helper ditching 17 features in January), the company must have a very good reason for casually adding Siri. Maybe even two good reasons…
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