Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is also ushering the baseball season with style. The firm has enabled its digital assistant Siri to access as much knowledge as possible about baseball.
This means iPhone users can ask Siri any question about baseball and the digital assistant will answer to the best of its ability. The tech company introduced the feature just as the baseball season kicks in. The company fed Siri with baseball information for thousands of MLB players from the baseball legends of the past to all the players in the present leagues.
Additionally, Siri now has statistical data of most of the MLB games that took place in the past. It can also handle league level questions from as many as 29 baseball leagues from Nippon Pro Baseball to the Cape Cod League. However, it does not offer support for data that is player-specific in the 29 leagues, though it can answer questions about the scores for every team. It is definitely one of the most interesting ways to usher in the baseball season. It also presents an opportunity for the company to showcase its natural language processing capacity.
Apple has been working towards making Siri appear more naturalistic or more human-like. The firm has even removed the phrase “here is what I found on the web” as part of its efforts to make it sound less like a robot. Though Siri has access to statistics, its answers are only limited to what it can understand. Some numbers such as WAR are not in its scope of understanding and, therefore, it is not able to answer such statistics heads. Nevertheless, it can give base percentages.
Siri acquires the baseball information from a series of websites including Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo! Sports, and MLB. The digital assistant has been providing schedules and scores since iOS 6, and the same is expected to continue. The company announced a multi-year agreement with MLB, which endorses the use of the iPad Pro in the dugout. The company will package the iPad Pro with an app called “Dugout” which was developed by both Apple and the MLB.