“The iPhone shows no signs of going away, and it’s possible to imagine that we’ll still be carrying some form of computing device in our pockets for decades to come. But the way we interact with our phones is already changing,” Will Oremus writes for Slate. “Touchscreens and buttons are giving way to voice assistants such as Siri, Google, Alexa, and Cortana.”
“The Echo — or Google’s rival, Home — can’t literally replace your iPhone, in the sense that you can’t carry it around in your pocket everywhere you go. But you can carry Alexa or Google Assistant anywhere: The software behind the Echo and the Home could theoretically serve as the brains behind any number of devices, including your phone,” Oremus writes. “Apple can make its own version of the Echo, of course, and it announced on June 5 that it is doing just that. It will be called the HomePod, and it’s entirely possible that it will be a better piece of hardware than either the Echo or Google Home. But as with the self-driving car, Apple won’t be able to win on hardware and user interface alone. The smart speaker, like the vehicle, is just a dumb vessel for the artificially intelligent software that drives it.”
“Apple, of all companies, should have seen this coming. Siri was on the very leading edge of artificially intelligent assistants when Apple bought it back in 2010. But Apple didn’t realize what it had. The company saw Siri as a nifty feature to improve its flagship device, the iPhone. As such, it never made the kind of investment in Siri that would have been needed to turn it into something much bigger,” Oremus writes. “But other companies saw Siri and thought: We can do that. And so they did. Each of the big five tech companies now has its own A.I. shop and its own A.I. assistant, and some of them have arguably surpassed Siri in capabilities.”
“More importantly, Apple’s rivals—Amazon in particular—thought more creatively about the type of devices an A.I. assistant might lend itself to,” Oremus writes. “while Apple was busy building tablets and watches that worked like iPhones, Amazon went out and built a brand-new type of device that worked very differently… Apple’s future, in short, is not a device—not a small one like a phone or a big one like a car. It’s Siri.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Siri is an important part of Apple future. Apple is very large. So large that most people cannot wrap their heads around immensity.
As for Apple’s HomePod, well over a year ago, we correctly predicted that Apple would debut a “Siri Speaker” and, when they finally got around to it, they’d be called a follower for doing so. We outlined why a “Siri Speaker” — Apple’s second Siri-centric device after AirPods — might work better for people, even when Siri is ever-present inside our iPhones, Apple Watches, iPads, and Macs. And, we stated our expectation that Apple’s “Siri Speaker’ would quickly take the coveted premium portion of the market:
Something along the lines of Amazon Echo is what Apple should have done if run by competent, forward-thinking management. When Apple finally does do their version of Amazon Echo (and they will get around to doing such a product eventually) they will rightly be called a follower. The company had all of the ingredients to make their own Echo before Amazon, except for the vision, it seems. — MacDailyNews, March 29, 2016
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There could be a psychological component to this that leads people use Alexa over Siri precisely because they know the Echo is there (it’s a physical object), but forget about Siri being everywhere, even on their wrists (because Siri is embedded inside devices that are “for other things” in the user’s mind (telling time, watching TV, computing, phone calls, etc.) and therefore “hidden” to the user. Hence, Siri gets forgotten and goes unused while people use Alexa…
Again: We believe people use Alexa because Amazon Echo is a physical manifestation of “her,” while forgetting about Siri even though she’s on their wrists at all times and/or in their iPhones and iPads because Siri is hidden inside objects whose primary function is something other than “personal assistant” in people’s minds (watch, TV, phone or tablet, as opposed to “Siri.”) Alexa is present thanks to the Amazon Echo. Siri is absent because she has no such counterpart; no physical manifestation.
Siri is a ghost. Alexa is that cool, fun, glowing tube right there on the counter.
Apple would do well to not discount the psychology behind why people use certain features, even though cold, hard logic tells them it’s a redundant and unnecessary product.
An “Apple Echo” device would sell in the millions of units per quarter and boost Siri usage immensely. — MacDailyNews, June 15, 2016
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Once they finally get something shipping in quantity, it’ll be fun to watch how quickly Apple takes the top end of the market away from Amazon’s Echo since Apple’s solution will certainly have unique advantages within Apple’s ecosystem that makes it the obvious choice for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch users. — MacDailyNews, May 10, 2017
