Apple planning to power up Siri with photo tagging and searching skills

Apple planning to power up Siri with photo tagging and searching skills
Photo-centric Siri boost on the way?

Apple is planning to widen the scope of its hit-and-miss personal voice assistant Siri, in order to include iPhone owners' photo libraries, judging by a newly published patent application.

The filing, spotted by AppleInsider, speaks of "a method for tagging or searching images using a voice-based digital assistant."

Users would be able to tag the photos as they take them, with one example quoting a user saying "This is me at the beach" with other photos in the same geographic location tagged accordingly.

According to the application, the tech would also recognise faces, buildings and landscapes to apply tags to photos in the iOS Camera Roll.

Call 'em up

Naturally, users would then be able to call up those photos at will by using Siri to say "show pictures of me at the beach."

The company is already grouping like minded photos together within the iOS 7 Photos app, so adding Siri to this wouldn't be too much of a stretch.

The application itself was published in March 2013, so if Apple plans to follow through on the feature, it's somewhat surprising the functionality wasn't built into iOS 7.

Via The Next Web

Chris Smith

A technology journalist, writer and videographer of many magazines and websites including T3, Gadget Magazine and TechRadar.com. He specializes in applications for smartphones, tablets and handheld devices, with bylines also at The Guardian, WIRED, Trusted Reviews and Wareable. Chris is also the podcast host for The Liverpool Way. As well as tech and football, Chris is a pop-punk fan and enjoys the art of wrasslin'.