If you’re a sports nut like I am, and you absoultely must know who’s winning the game while you’re out with friends, things could be about to get a whole lot easier for you on your iPhone.
Evan Coleman, a Cydia developer, noticed that Apple’s servers now recognize sports names as speech tokens for its service. Long story short, asking Siri a string of words like “what’s the temperature in New York City?” would return five tokens, recognizing New York City as one element and not three distinct words. While working on SiriSports, a popular Siri tweak in the Cydia store, Colemen noticed that Apple’s servers are suddenly recognizing team names as a single token. For instance, Siri’s servers now recognize the New York Yankees as a particlular item instead of three distinct words.
When you add Colemen’s findings to the fact that ESPN has recently opened up an API for premium partners, Colemen was left wondering if ESPN’s API was about to be included in Siri in the near future. ESPN responded to Coleman, indicating that ESPN “works closely with Apple on many fronts.”
Like Coleman points out, the interaction between ESPN and Apple could be on a number of other fronts, but given the context, it certainly leaves us wondering if sports scores are coming to Siri sooner rather than later.
You can read Evan’s post on his personal blog, along with the email from ESPN.
