Apple hiring engineers for its virtual assistant, Siri

Apple’s job listings have positions open for software and iOS engineers for Siri.

Apple’s Siri is currently facing tough competition from its competitors Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. (AFP)

To augment the experience between a user and its Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant Siri, Apple has posted several job openings for engineers at its different offices globally.

According to the data accumulated by Thinknum, the number of open positions that contain the term "Siri" has accelerated in recent weeks, with a current all-time high of 161 job listings posted on Saturday alone.

"This marks a jump in hiring for the keyword of 24% in just over a month," Thinknum, a web platform that allows investors to get data driven investment ideas by monitoring companies' websites, said late on Saturday.

The job openings are largely based at Apple's new headquarters in the Santa Clara Valley. Of the 161 openings, 125 are based there, the data showed.

When it came to the patterns in the job titles, the most common title is "Siri -- Software Engineer", of which there are five positions. Three positions, "Siri -- iOS Engineer" has three replicated openings.

"The rest is a smattering of engineering skillsets, from Infrastructure Engineers, to Machine Learning Engineers, to Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineers," the web portal said.

Apple has been under fire due to Siri's lagging intelligence. Several media reports have suggested that Siri's performance was below par, especially when compared to her competitors at Amazon (Alexa) and Google (Assistant).

According to a study by investment firm Loup Ventures, Siri on the HomePod could correctly answer just 52% of 782 standardised questions. Google's Home speaker got 81% right and Amazon's Echo got 64%. In those tests, the HomePod was weakest on questions about navigation and general information.