A recently published patent application shows Apple is working on ways to allow Siri to sort and find photos on your iOS device via voice search and tagging.
The company’s interests were revealed in a new patent application published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday, discovered by AppleInsider. The filing, entitled “Voice-Based Image Tagging and Searching,” describes associating “natural language” text strings with photographs saved on a device, like an iPhone.
Text strings would be associated with speech input, and could be associated with photos covering people or things, locations, and activities.
Apple’s application notes the increased numbers of photos being stored on devices, and says that the system would make photos easier to find by voice tagging them, and then searching for photos based on location, names, etc.
Photo tagging could be performed manually by the user, or automatically by the device itself, based on the time and location of the photo. The system could also automatically recognize face, landscapes and buildings to tag similar shots. A user could tell Siri that a photograph was of the user, and the system would then tag any other photos that include the user’s face. The system could then search for photos using such spoken search terms as, “Show photos of me at the beach.”
