New patent shows Apple studying network broadcast strength to improve Siri's location-based responses

     Apple is continuing to refine Siri's ability to share information and context between devices to enable more nuanced, location-aware voice commands. Apple was awarded a patent on Tuesday titled "Digital Assistant Hardware Abstraction" that covers intelligent context sharing and task execution between a group of devices with intelligent assistant capabilities.

　　Apple stated in the patent that a place, such as a home or office, may contain multiple devices with digital assistant functions. Therefore, it is best to share contextual information between multiple devices so that the digital assistants of multiple devices can intelligently coordinate task execution based on user requirements.

　　Apple then defines several examples in the patent, focusing on issuing commands to groups of devices. The system relies on the overall environment and data shared between all devices and the intelligent digital assistant, and then interprets what the command should do based on this data.

　　Parts of this technology are already used in Apple's HomeKit and Siri systems. For example, if a user issues the command "Hey Siri" while having a HomePod, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch, only one of these devices will actually receive and execute the command.

　　Another example given in the patent is related to alarm events. There are a lot of details about how turning off the alarm on one device can send a signal to cut off the alarm sound on other devices in the user's network. While this capability also exists between the Apple Watch and iPhone, it can also be extended to other devices in the user's home setup.

　　The patent provides a lot of details about various Apple devices and explains how the system determines which device to use in a particular situation. For example, the context collection system can analyze device scores based on the strength of the connection between the device and its network. One section describes a system for determining the battery life of a device.