How Siri finds local destinations in your language'Accurately recognizing named entities, like small local businesses, has remained a performance bottleneck.' — Siri Speech Recognition Team
Personal assistants like Siri have gotten better and better at recognizing what we're saying, at least in general. When it comes to recognizing names, including business names, especially regional names, the challenge has been greater.
Apple's Machine Learning Journal describes how the Siri team has been tackling it:
Generally, virtual assistants correctly recognize and understand the names of high-profile businesses and chain stores like Starbucks, but have a harder time recognizing the names of the millions of smaller, local POIs that users ask about. In ASR, there's a known performance bottleneck when it comes to accurately recognizing named entities, like small local businesses, in the long tail of a frequency distribution.
We decided to improve Siri's ability to recognize names of local POIs by incorporating knowledge of the u...
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How Siri finds local destinations in your language
