The majority of Apple customers are outside of the U.S. so the company developed a feature unique to its smartphones. One thing Siri can do that the other virtual assistants cannot is to speak 21 languages in 36 countries.

Google Assistant debuted last week, signaling a more competitive battlefield for artificial intelligence (AI) developers. For one thing, Siri is the oldest program in the market today and its ability to understand various speeches allows it to answer questions better than its competitors. Oren Etzioni, CEO for Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said Apple has accomplished a decent lead when it comes to AI reliability.

Apple Siri adds Shanghainese to its vocabulary

Per 9To5Mac, Apple installs a whole new language called Shanghainese to further extend the vocabulary of Siri. Alex Acero, Head of the Speech Team, explained that the Cupertino-based firm starts working on a new language by bringing in real people to read passages in a range of accents and dialects. These recordings would then be transcribed by hand so the computer will have an exact representation of the spoken text.

Apple also collects a range of sounds in different voices to develop an acoustic model that predicts word sequences. Siri developers then add a digital translator known as the "dictation mode". The finished recordings with background noise are transcribed manually again to cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

Upon gathering enough data and finding a voice actor to play Siri in the new language, Apple releases the AI assistant with answers to the most commonly asked questions by fans. Of course, as it learns about new questions in the real-world, the company tweaks it every two weeks. Shanghainese is a special dialect of Wu Chinese limited around Shanghai, China.

Google Assistant vs Microsoft Cortana; Amazon Alexa vs Apple Siri

Reuters reported that Google Assistant can only speak a total of four languages. In contrast, Microsoft Cortana knows eight dialects across 13 countries. Meanwhile, Amazon Alexa features two languages only: English and German. Indeed, Apple Siri is way ahead of its opponents and continues to extend that lead.

The language race is becoming more important as digital assistants are seen to be the foundations of future smartphones. As of now, understanding and speaking native dialects is still complicated for these programs, even for Apple Siri. The same source said that if someone asks for a football score in Britain, the assistant must say "two-nil" instead of "two-nothing".