Apple Celebrates Siri’s 10th Birthday with New Jokes and Quirky Responses

BY Mahit Huilgol

Published 4 Oct 2021

Siri in iOS 15

It has been ten years since Apple announced Siri. Today the company is celebrating 10th anniversary for its personal assistant Siri. To commemorate you can wish Siri “Happy Birthday.” Over the past ten years Siri has come a long way and is now capable of handling more complicated tasks.

The personal assistant is smarter than before. In fact the first iteration of Siri did very little apart from showing weather, adding calender appointment and search web. Now Siri is availble in multiple voices and Siri Shortcuts can be used to automate your workflow. If you wish Siri by saying “Happy Birthday,” here is what it will say:

Aww! It’s hard to beleive that in only a decade I’ve gone from a newbord beta to a virtual assistant who can tell you the time, tell you a joke and tell you thanks for the birthday wishes!

 

Wel,l I gave it another go just for the heck of it. This time around Siri had a fairly different reply.

Yes, it will be happy. I get to spend it with you! So what shall we do? I can tell you some jokes! I’ve learned a lot in the las 10 years.

This is where the Siri magic ends. We asked Siri to tell us some jokes. However, the personal assitant had a vague reply stating “That may be beyond my abilities at the moment.” This brings us to one of the biggest downsides, lack of contextual awareness.

Siri on iOS 15

Despite being launched a decade ago Siri is playing catch-up with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa on many fronts. On the brighter side, Apple’s personal assistant gets new and interesting features with iOS 15 update. Best of all is that Siri now supports offline speech recognition on devices running A12 Bionic and above. The feature is enabled via on-device speech processing and Apple Neural Engine.