Apple’s Hiring To Improve Siri, Possibly Readying API For Third Parties

While Siri is no doubt one of the coolest features I’ve ever seen on a phone, we’re all still dealing with some form of disenchantment. Siri blows your mind that first day, and then it feels like you spend the rest of your time chasing that magic, repeating things so she’ll understand, waiting for her to get over “trouble connecting to the network,” etc. Luckily though, Apple is on the hunt for a few stellar iOS engineers to not only make Siri more beautiful, but also to perhaps get her ready for third party integration.

Siri UI boss Dan Keen last night tweeted “Want to help make Siri even better? I’m hiring :),” with links to two job postings. Both call for Siri UI software engineers, reports 9to5Mac. In both posts there is specific mention of a Siri API.

iOS Software Engineer:

We are looking for an engineer to join the team that implements the UI for Siri. You will primarily be responsible for implementing the content that appears within the conversational view. 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. Consider it an entire miniature OS within the OS, and you get a good idea of the scope!

Each of these little “snippets” corresponds to an individual application, so you will have extensive cross-functional work with many other teams. You’ll need to work with them to enable access to their data and behaviors, and wire them up to your implementations. As a result, strong API design is needed to keep communications ideal.

Apple then gets even more poignant with its API needs.

Senior iOS Software Engineer:

We are looking for an engineer to join the team that implements the UI for Siri. You will primarily be responsible for implementing the conversation view and its many different 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. You will have several clients of your code, so the ability to formulate and support a clear API is needed.

There’s no question that one day the Siri API will be available to third-party developers. The demand for it is clear, as we’re already seeing hackers do some pretty awesome things with Siri unofficially. But Apple switched up its strategy with this feature, releasing it as a somewhat unpolished beta. That said, it’ll take time and apparently two more software engineers to get our artificially intelligent friend ready for developers.