Why Apple’s smarts are in the silicon
Where other tech firms tend to use the cloud for their machine learning heavy lifting – by uploading data, chucking huge amounts of processing power at it and downloading the results – Apple prefers to do it on your device. And the reason for that is simple: it protects your privacy.
The problem with doing the processing locally is that we use the same services across multiple devices. But Apple’s thought of that, and uses a technique called federated learning to train all your devices without invading your privacy. It does this for Siri, for QuickType and for the ‘Siri found in apps’ feature that identifies interesting things.
With federated learning, your device processes your data locally – so as you talk to Siri on iPhone, your phone refines its model of your voice. Now for the clever bit. When that model is updated, your phone shares the model but not the audio with your other devices. So when your iPhone gets to know you better, so does your iPad
– but the iPad never hears your original audio.