Apple Quietly Supercharges Siri (Video)

Apple may have quietly supercharged Siri this week, offering better voice recognition, faster responses and making Siri more usable in general.

Using voice dictation is vastly improved this morning, with the iPhone recognizing many words it normally struggles with and offering better performance in a noisy environment. dictation is still far from perfect, but it is much better.

Siri is also much more useful after whatever changes Apple made. In our quick tests Siri is able to deliver answers faster and more reliably than in recent memory. We were able to create events and send status updates on Twitter and Facebook without multiple corrections.

Faster, More Accurate Siri

According to many Reddit users, Siri voice recognition has improved, offering faster results and more accurate dictation. The Siri hands on video below illustrates some areas where Siri is faster and where voice dictation is more accurate.

While it is tough to benchmark the speed of Siri today vs. several days ago, the results appear faster and more accurate on the iPhone and iPad.

If Apple did supercharge the service, it was not as part of an iOS update. iOS 6.1.2 is several weeks old and iOS 6.1.3 has yet to arrive. While Apple typically saves big features for an update like iOS 7, we could see improvements that will enable new Siri features.

Apple may have updated the server-side software or added server capacity to deliver a better overall Siri experience. Earlier this week Apple pushed updates to Apple Maps without issuing an iOS update, so it is possible that the company was able to deliver a speed boost to Siri without prompting users to take action.

Siri is Apple’s personal assistant on the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPad mini, iPad 3 and iPad 4. Users can hold the home button for about two seconds to activate Siri. From there users can check their schedule, the weather, sports scores and much more.

[polldaddy poll=6957355]