Almost five years after Apple brought voice control into the mainstream with Siri, the company is making plans to bring the feature to its desktop operating system, Mac OS X.
According to 9to5Mac, the 10.12 release of OS X will include Siri as a feature of the menu bar at the top of the screen, similar to the universal search Spotlight mechanic that sits there now. And like Spotlight, it will include a keyboard shortcut for easy activation. According to the site’s sources, “When a user clicks the Siri button, a dark, transparent Siri interface will appear in the top right corner of the screen,” though the interface could change before its expected unveiling this summer.
It’s the latest move in an accelerating shift toward natural-language interfaces — that is, modes of using your computer that involve “talking” to it instead of using a mouse or your finger to point and click. As computers have become essential not just to work but to day-to-day life, and as they have gotten smaller and ever-present, the largest technology companies are all attempting to make them more natural to work with.
Siri, despite being the first to popularize talking to a computer as if it were a person, has been slow to make its way from iOS to OS X. In the four or so years since its introduction, the “OK Google” feature has been worked into Chromebooks, and Microsoft’s competitor, Cortana, similarly made its debut in Windows 10 last fall.
