With all the time, money, and embarrassment Apple has offered up on the altar of Siri, it’s only a logical next step to see the virtual personal assistant migrate over to Mac OS X.
The question is not if, but when?
And we may be getting closer, as Apple has listed a job posting looking for a Siri UI Engineer with a few hints at OS X integration.
This isn’t the first we’re hearing of a potential Siri rollout on the desktop level. In November, 9to5mac reported that Siri and Apple maps would be present in the next version of OS X.
The job listing calls for an engineer “responsible for implementing the content that appears within the conversational view.”
They call it a “broad-ranging task,” considering all the various applications Siri must interact with to be useful, and all while conserving the limited resources of mobile devices.
“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!” the listing reads.
Yet, nowhere in the job posting is there mention of iOS specifically. There is, however, mention of Mac OS X. Under key requirements, Apple asks for knowledge of all of Apple’s development APIs (both iOS and Mac OS X), as well as “familiarity with Unix, especially Mac OS X.”
Obviously, the listing is still very ambiguous, but it signals that Apple is beefing up Siri for something new. And as AppleInsider astutely notes, Dictation has already found its way onto the desktop (just like it did on the iPad before Siri showed up in tablet-form).
It all adds up, but we’ll have to wait on Apple’s word before we know for sure.