And the Emmy award goes to… Siri on Apple TV!
- aug
- 30
Put an intelligent virtual assistant with multilingual parsing on a television box and you might just score an Emmy Award. At least if your name is Siri.
Apple TV's Siri implementation has been given an Emmy Award. Specifically, a Technical / Engineering Achievement Award. Far as I can find, this is the first time a virtual assistant has been honored by the television industry awards.
From the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences:
Contextual Voice Navigation for Discovering and Interacting with TV Content
- Comcast
- Universal Electronics (UEI)
- Apple TV
- Nuance Dragon TV
Siri on Apple TV is notable because it can handle multiple sequential languages, which is an incredibly tough problem to crack.
In this case, Siri has to understand the first language to figure out the action it needs to perform, like playing a movie. Then, Siri needs to recognize the speaker is switching to a second language and figure out the subject of the action, like the title of the movie.
Humans are born pattern recognizers and ideally suited to tasks like that. Computers, not so much. They need an incredible amount of work to even begin to get it right.
It's great the Siri team is putting in that work, and that they're getting recognized for it. Can't wait to see what's next.
