Siri is a competent personal assistant as it stands, but not much more. Although Siri is capable of finding a great deal of information very quickly, it is limited by resources it currently pulls data from, which include Yahoo, Bing and WolframAlpha. Apple might be looking to remedy this issue, however: A patent application filed with the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office back in March and published this Thursday entitled “Crowd Sourcing Information to Fulfill User Requests” could be the first sign of a huge addition to Siri.
According to the patent, if Siri is unable to find an answer for the user through its typical channels, “information relevant to the user request is crowd-sourced by querying one or more crowd sourcing information sources.” A response is then generated based on either one or a combination of several of the results. This might mean longer response times, but the tradeoff for an exponential increase in Siri’s abilities would be worth the wait.
By implementing crowdsourced data from countless users all over the internet, each one of us could become a useful resource to Siri. That said, if Apple does end up going through with this, let’s hope they have the good sense to avoid pulling any information from Yahoo Answers.
