On the heels of a feature story in Wired last week, Apple executives and engineers opened up about how Siri works in interviews with Fast Company. As the publication explained it, a narrative has emerged that Apple’s AI work is behind other companies’ efforts because of its dedication to user privacy.

In an interview with Fast Company, Apple’s Greg Joswiak disagrees:

“I think it is a false narrative. It’s true that we like to keep the data as optimized as possible, that’s certainly something that I think a lot of users have come to expect, and they know that we’re treating their privacy maybe different than some others are.”

Joswiak argues that Siri can be every bit as helpful as other assistants without accumulating a lot of personal user data in the cloud, as companies like Facebook and Google are accustomed to doing. “We’re able to deliver a very personalized experience … without treating you as a product that keeps your information and sells it to the highest bidder. That’s just not the way we operate.”

The article provides concrete examples of how Siri works and the advances that have been made since it was introduced with a level of detail that has not been shared before.

The effectiveness of Siri and Apple’s machine learning research is an area where Apple’s culture of secrecy has hurt it. Apple seems to have recognized this and has made a concerted effort to turn perceptions around with interviews like the ones in Wired and Fast Company. Apple employees have also begun to engage in more public discussion of the company’s machine learning and AI initiatives through outlets like its recently-introduced journal and presentations made by Apple employees. Apple even enlisted The Rock to help it get the word out about Siri’s capabilities. Competition for virtual personal assistant supremacy has heated up, and Apple has signaled it has no intention of being left out or backing down.

David Pierce has a feature story on WIRED today that’s all about Siri – especially the new Siri voice coming in iOS 11. It features a variety of interesting details concerning Siri’s history, the way Apple thinks about the digital assistant, and in-depth details on how new Siri languages are added.

One of my favorite bits involves a quote from Apple’s VP of product marketing, Greg Jozwiak, who said Apple focuses on Siri’s ability to get things done:

It drives him crazy that people compare virtual assistants by asking trivia questions, which always makes Siri look bad. “We didn’t engineer this thing to be Trivial Pursuit!” he says.

This explains Siri’s productivity-focused commercial starring The Rock, and also helps make sense of the fact that Siri is often embarrassingly clueless when it comes to current events or other simple queries. Though Apple’s awareness of the problem exacerbates its lack of a suitable response in beefing up Siri’s trivia knowledge.

Other interesting tidbits from the story include the fact that Siri now has a massive 375 million active monthly users, and that Siri’s new, more natural voice was inspired in part by the movie Her.

Earlier this year Tom Gruber, the co-creator of Siri and current member of Apple’s AI team, gave a TED talk focusing on his vision for the future of AI, which is rooted in a philosophy he calls “humanistic AI.” The video and full transcript for that talk recently became available, providing a broader audience with Gruber’s insights into the place of AI in our everyday lives. While he doesn’t offer any specifics regarding work Apple is doing in this space, it is clear that Gruber’s vision represents, at least in part, the vision of Apple for Siri and AI as a whole.

Gruber describes humanistic AI as “artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs by collaborating and augmenting people.” This theme of AI augmenting, complementing humans is fleshed out by Gruber in several ways; one example involves Siri serving as an accessibility tool, while another theorizes at the benefits AI can offer to the human memory. The full talk provides an interesting glimpse into how Apple sees AI evolving in the near future.

Stephen Nellis, writing for Reuters, shares an interesting look into Apple’s method for teaching Siri a new language:

At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, an acoustic model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

After enough data has been gathered and a voice actor has been recorded to play Siri in a new language, Siri is released with answers to what Apple estimates will be the most common questions, Acero said. Once released, Siri learns more about what real-world users ask and is updated every two weeks with more tweaks.

The report also shares that one of Siri’s next languages will be Shanghainese, a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in Shanghai and surrounding areas. This addition will join the existing 21 languages Siri currently speaks, which are localized across a total of 36 different countries.

Debating the strengths and weaknesses of Siri has become common practice in recent years, particularly as competing voice assistants from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have grown more intelligent. But one area Siri has long held the lead over its competition is in supporting a large variety of different languages. It doesn’t seem like Apple will be slowing down in that regard.