With Siri and CarPlay being sold as high-profile features of Apple’s flagship product, it’s no surprise that Cupertino is doubling down on audio research and development. Over the last few months, Apple has quietly hired multiple notable audio experts, and that leads me to believe that we’re in for some serious audio processing improvements in the next couple of years. Is an offline version of Siri in the works, or is Apple working on something even bigger?

Earlier this month, Dana Massie rejoined Apple as an SoC audio architect. Previously, he worked at both NeXT and Apple, and he most recently served as the director of DSP (Digital Signal Processing) architecture for Audience. Similarly, Peter Eastty joined Apple back in September as a director of SoC audio processing. Eastty has twice served as the CTO of Oxford Digital, so he clearly has some serious prowess in the realm of audio processing. Since these hires happened practically back-to-back, it seems that Apple is prioritizing its audio systems going forward.

Take a step back, and it’s easy to see why audio is so important for Apple. Siri, CarPlay, VoLTE, and voice text all heavily rely on high-quality audio processing. As it stands, much of the heavy lifting for complex audio processing is being done on Apple’s servers. Unfortunately, that makes features like voice dictation and hands-free dialing impossible to pull-off without a strong internet connection. As someone who lives in an area with spotty cell coverage, Siri is all but dead to me when I drive. If more functionality can moved onto the device itself, suddenly Siri actually becomes useful to me.

If Apple wants CarPlay to succeed, it needs to work all the time — not just when your phone has access to Apple’s servers. Considering that Apple products are supposed to “just work,” it’s always jarring when Siri refuses to respond to simple commands. If these new hires can develop better dedicated audio processing hardware, and remove the need for a network connection for basic functionality, then CarPlay might just have a real chance in the market.

Of course, it’s always possible that Apple acquired this new talent to make something completely new and exciting instead. After all, Amazon just recently threw its hat in the voice processing game, and maybe Tim Cook sees these moves as a threat to the longevity of Apple’s products and services. What could Cupertino be up to? If you have a theory about what Apple has planned, take a moment to sound off in the comment section below this post.

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