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Devs: Fancy a job teaching Siri to speak the Queen's English?

Spik propa lyk dis blud innit, ya get me?

Apple looks set to give Siri a few language lessons after advertising for experts in a variety of hitherto non-fruity dialects.

According to its job listings, Apple is looking to employ a number of Siri language engineers to help roll out its personal assistant across the world.

"Come and join the team that teaches Siri how to understand and speak new languages," Apple said. "We are an extremely diverse and passionate group dedicated to bringing the future of intelligent assistants to the world. We are looking for a highly motivated engineer, expert in foreign languages and with strong software development skills to join our team."

The fruity firm is looking for someone to teach Siri "British English" or as it's generally known, English English or Real English. Australian English is also going to be catered for along with Danish, Japanese, Norwegian, Turkish, Arabic, Thai and a whole host of other languages too, although nothing really weird like Tagalog has been listed.

Anyone looking for a job should be fluent in the language they will work with and have "focus or experience in classification, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning or related sub-fields".

Siri is already pretty clever and can speak English (or American, as it should properly be labelled), German, French, Cantonese and a number of other languages.

The next version of iOS is due to be released in the autumn. Rumours suggest it will have an annoying "hey Siri" function, allowing annoying happy clappy types to turn their device on or visit the app store with a minimum of phone fondling. Shazam is also expected to make an appearance, allowing fanbois to identify any ditty they come across in their travels.

Not all changes to Apple's operating system are welcome. For instance, this writer's Apple Map app has started giving directions in a Welsh accent. Is nothing sacred? ®

 

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