Apple continued to expand its Siri virtual assistant this week with new data integrations for golf and tennis, additions apparently timed to coincide with the start of the Australian Open next Monday.
With new integrations in place, users can ask Siri about live tennis and golf scores, upcoming tournament schedules, player stats, historical data and more.
For example, Siri now responds to commands like “How did Roger Federer do at the Australian Open” and “Who is playing at the Australian Open today?” With the tournament currently in the qualifying phase, Siri doesn’t have an answer to the latter question yet.
Tennis data includes scores and statistics from the Association of Tennis Professionals, Women’s Tennis Association and Grand Slam matches dating back to 2016, while golf data covers the major PGA and LPGA Tours dating back to 2007.
Before the recent update, Siri would direct users searching for information about tennis or golf to the web or social media sites like Twitter.
Apple currently offers sports data to users in 26 countries, including major markets such as the United States, China, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom. In addition to tennis and golf, Siri can answer users’ questions about baseball, basketball, American football, hockey and soccer.
Apple is steadily developing back-end support for its virtual assistant technology, which will make its way into homes with HomePod later this year. Apple’s first smart speaker is expected to debut early 2018 Siri integration is built in, giving owners the ability to access Siri’s database, play music and podcasts, control HomeKit devices and more.
