Fruity cargo cult, Apple is getting worried that its other voice-enabled assistant Siri is being outclassed by Google’s products. The company has been going on a big hiring spree aimed at improving Siri’s overall intelligence and reactivity.

It looks as though “Apple has formed its own speech recognition team and that a neural-net-boosted Siri is on the way.” It is not going to be a neural-net Siri of course, that is just spin designed to attract the Tame Apple Press -- neural nets are a way off yet, and a long way from running on a smartphone.

It worked too, Wired reported that this means is “it’s only a matter of time before Apple starts using neural nets to help bolster Siri’s intelligence, just as Google and Microsoft have done to bolster the intelligence of their own voice-enabled assistants.” Of course it did not say how much time. Probably the same time we go to work in a rocket pack.

Just so that Apple can keep copying Microsoft, it has hired longtime Redmond’s speech recognition technology researcher Alex Acero as a senior director at its Siri group. It has also hired Gunnar Evermann, a former engineer at voice recognition software pioneer Nuance and Arnab Ghoshal, who previously did voice tech research at the University of Edinburgh.