“As long-time readers will know, I’ve long been a fan of Siri,” Ben Lovejoy writes for 9to5Mac. “But Siri does have one major failing: it has no access to third-party apps. There are countless apps where I’d love to be able to get Siri to do the heavy lifting. If Apple offered an API to allow third-party developers to take advantage of Siri, I’m confident that many would do so.”
“But it turns out that Siri’s original developers wanted to take things a step further,” Lovejoy writes. “Rather than simply ask Siri to call on third-party apps to carry out tasks, they wanted to cut out the middleman and integrate directly with the underlying services themselves.”
The team behind Siri debuts its next-gen AI “Viv” at #TCDisrupt https://t.co/m3Kf6OrtXc
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) May 9, 2016
“A full third of the [original Siri] team left Apple to create a brand new intelligent assistant that would do all of the things they weren’t allowed to do with Siri: Viv. Yesterday, we got our first look at the result to date – and it’s incredibly impressive,” Lovejoy writes. “Why Apple wanted to turn down this kind of power defeats me. Perhaps it’s Apple’s penchant for control.”
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Perhaps there are security/privacy issues that Apple’s considered in their admittedly very go-slow (neutral is more like it) Siri approach? Or Apple’s guarding against the world’s most popular personal assistant being misused/abused in some way – by pranksters or rivals for marketing gain or criminals or something?
There has to be some reason for Apple going so very slowly and seemingly cautiously with Siri, right?
We certainly hope and expect that we’ll be hearing more about Siri next month at WWDC.
SEE ALSO:
Meet Viv, the next-gen AI assistant, from the creators of Siri – May 9, 2016