Builds toward planned Siri improvements

Apple has opened up two new job positions for Siri engineers, notes Silicon Alley Insider. The first is simply titled iOS Siri UI Engineer, and asks for someone capable of implementing the conservation view and related actions. "This includes defining a system that enables a dialog to appear intuitive, a task that involves many subtle UI behaviors in a dynamic, complex system," Apple writes.

The other position calls for an iOS Siri UI Snippet Engineer. "This is a broad-ranging task -- we take every application that Siri interacts with, distill it down to fundamentals, and implement that application's UI in a theme fitting with Siri," says Apple. "Consider it an entire miniature OS within the OS, and you get a good idea of the scope!"

The snippets in question are the custom information displays that appear in response to specific commands. A version of Wolfram Alpha may appear in response to a math question, for instance, while Yelp will pop up when asking for nearby restaurants. Only a relative handful of snippets are currently in Siri however; the job listing suggests that Apple is planning to grow that amount.

Thanks to an FAQ, Apple's immediate plans for Siri are known to involve bringing Maps and local search to more countries in 2012. It has also been rumored that iOS 5.1's version of Siri will enable hardware controls, such as capturing photos and video, and toggling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

by MacNN Staff