Apple’s Siri, the virtual personal assistant that’s currently available in the company’s mobile product line, could be making its way to the Apple TV set-top box, if a newly discovered code string is to be believed. An entry in the iOS 7.1 software development kit mentions Siri support for the Apple TV, 9to5Mac is reporting after confirming its existence in the code. Apple did its best to hide the feature, calling Siri “Assistant” in its code and using integer value “3” to describe Apple TV.
Code found within the iOS 7.1 SDK suggests that Siri is headed to the Apple TV in future. Pierre Blazquez first found the reference on Friday. 9to5Mac has since confirmed that the code does exist in both iOS 7.1 and iOS 7.1.1′s files. The reference does not exist in 7.0.6. The file is a supporting property-list resource for Assistant (Apple’s internal name for Siri), containing information about the feature. The UIDeviceFamily array declares what platforms are compatible with the feature. As shown by Apple’s documentation, ’1′ and ’2′ represent the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad families. The ’3′ represents the Apple TV family. The Apple TV has been given the ’3′ designation ever since Apple TV became based off iOS. The Lowtide application uses the ’3′ identifier for instance, as do current Apple TV apps.
