Home > News

Apple Working on Changing Prompt From “Hey Siri” to “Siri”

By Laura Tucker
Apple Changing Hey Siri Featured

We’ve learned that to get things done, we can go through voice assistants, whether it’s Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, or Cortana. It can be easy to get them mixed up if you use more than one. Apple is changing things up and eliminating the word “hey” from “Hey Siri,” which could lead to more confusion. It’s unclear why Apple is making this move.

iOS 16.1 added many new features that weren’t included with iOS 16. Read on to learn how to use the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Changing the “Hey Siri” Wake Word

All of the voice assistants have wake words, which are the words you use to invoke the assistant. Cortana and Alexa are simply “Cortana” and “Alexa,” though Cortana was once “Hey Cortana.” Google Assistant is “Hey Google” or “Okay Google.” Siri has been “Hey Siri” since it was first introduced.

Apple Changing Hey Siri Dynamic Island
Image source: Unsplash

According to reports, Apple wants to make a change to its voice assistant and change the “Hey Siri” prompt to just “Siri.” Apple has been working on changing it for several months, testing it with employees.

Making this change in the voice assistant is more difficult than you would think. It takes a lot of training to teach Siri to understand the more simpler phrase with various accents and dialects. While having a more complex password makes it more difficult for someone to figure out, having a more complex wake makes it easier for Siri to understand.

If you’re interested in more ways to speed up the assistance, read on to discover this list of Siri shortcuts for power users.

Why Is Amazon Making This Change?

While it’s not entirely clear why Apple is making this change to Siri, it could be to make reactions to requests quicker. It turns the three-syllable request into a two-syllable request. Not only will you ask the question more quickly, but you’d also be able to ask follow-up questions more quickly.

If you’re reading this and thinking that Apple needs to improve Siri’s listening capabilities before it institutes a major change, the company’s engineers are already working on it. They’re working on third-party integration going deeper and taking the correct action after your request.

Apple Changing Hey Siri Apple Tv
Image source: Unsplash

It also resigned the tvOS 16.1 interface around Siri, leaving the question of whether Apple is changing “Hey Siri” for a greater unknown use, possibly for a measure that goes further than Apple TV.

It would seem it would still work if you said “Hey Siri” rather than just “Siri,” as you’re still using the shortened one-word phrase. That would be good news to me, as I feel like it would be difficult to remember to leave out the “hey.” I use both Siri and Alexa, so it’s easy to mix the two up; it will add to the complexity to also forget to drop the “hey.”

If you just want to change Siri’s voice or language, check out this tutorial.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.