“Google’s head of Android, Andy Rubin, at the AllThingsD conference… took a dig at Apple’s Siri interface: ‘I don’t believe your phone should be an assistant…Your phone is a tool for communicating,’ he opined, ‘You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone,'” Kit Eaton reports for Fast Company. “Microsoft’s Windows Phone president, Andy Lee, also leveled criticisms at Siri at AllThingsD. The type of personal assistant interaction delivered by Siri, Lee said, ‘isn’t super useful.'”
Eaton reports,” Such Siri disses have industry punters confused. Lee is definitely targeting the way Apple’s Siri uses curated resources to answer some questions, including Wolfram Alpha for slightly more math or fact-based answers, and Yelp for restaurant reviews. But have both executives overlooked the fact that Siri allows searches of Google and Bing (and Yahoo) when it can’t find a clever answer that marries Wolfram Alpha’s natural language query responses with its own easy-to-use, natural language interface?”
“Lee and Rubin must be nervous,” Eaton correctly concludes. “One thing Siri does that may have both Google and Microsoft quaking in their boots is to act as a first sift ‘layer’ for users trying to query the internet for information… Siri could gum up Google and Bing (and Yahoo) ad revenue… Another huge worry for Apple’s competitors should be that the company will take its expertise gained from Siri in Beta on the iPhone 4S, and turn it into a massive game-changer with Siri 1.0 on the iPhone, the upcoming iPad 3 and the Mac itself, especially since there’s no reason an adjustment to the already impressive voice control “assistive” interfaces in OS X couldn’t learn from mobile tech and be augmented.”
There are plenty more reasons why Google and Microsoft are (or should be) worried about Siri in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The Siri-less are scared shitless. And rightly so.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Karla S.” for the heads up.]
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