Apple Is Looking For Engineers To Help Make Siri More Conversational

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Screen Shot 2011-12-06 at 4.51.32 PM

Apple has posted two new job listings for Siri UI engineers. The positions mainly focus on improving Siri’s on-screen conversation view, but there also some hints in the job description that suggest Apple is looking to do more with its voice assistant’s API.

As highlighted by The Next Web, Apple is looking for talent to help develop Siri’s conversation view UI. One of the two generalist application developer positions also includes talk of working on Siri’s API:

We are looking for an engineer to join the team that implements the UI for Siri. You will primarily be responsible for implementing the conversation view and its many different actions. This includes defining a system that enables a dialog to appear intuitive, a task that involves many subtle UI behaviors in a dynamic, complex system. You will have several clients of your code, so the ability to formulate and support a clear API is needed.

The other job description:

We are looking for an engineer to join the team that implements the UI for Siri. You will primarily be responsible for implementing the content that appears within the conversational view. This is a broad-ranging task – we take every application that Siri interacts with, distill it down to fundamentals, and implement that application’s UI in a theme fitting with Siri. Consider it an entire miniature OS within the OS, and you get a good idea of the scope!

As we mentioned in our roundup of third-party apps that Apple should integrate with Siri, developers do not have access to Siri’s API. Apple could be suggesting that this new job position would entail working with third-party “clients” to help distribute the Siri API, or it could be referring to internal work between Apple’s own teams.

Currently, the only third-party services that Siri integrates with are Wolfram Alpha, Yelp, and Wikipedia. Apple has yet to say when (or if) it will open up the Siri API to other developers.

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