Deep Learning in Siri

Siri, Apple's personal assistant, first shipped in 2011 as part of iOS and brought conversational agents into the mainstream. Users can access Siri from their iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AppleTV and Carplay in 21 languages. Deep learning has revolutionized the field of machine learning, making a big impact in both core algorithms and application areas like speech recognition, critical for Siri. Mixture Density Networks, a particular type of deep learning, now power Apple's TTS engine, making Siri's voices more natural, smoother, and allowing Siri's personality to shine through. Accented speech, always a challenge for speech recognition systems, can be addressed by training deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks with various sources of data properly weighted in order to achieve a robust acoustic model.

Speaker: Alex Acero, Apple