“Asking Apple Inc.’s voice-activated assistant, Siri, what the company plans to unveil at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco next week elicits the response: ‘If I told you, they’d probably make me sit through product security again,'” Alex Webb reports for Bloomberg. “Witty, perhaps, but Siri will have to supply more satisfying answers if it’s going to convince customers, developers and investors that Apple is keeping pace with Alphabet Inc.’s Google Now and Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa in one of the hottest emerging areas of tech: virtual personal assistants.”
“Alongside updates to Apple Music and the company’s mobile, watch and television operating systems, Apple will announce that for the first time it will let outside developers integrate Siri with their apps, according to a person familiar with the plans,” Webb reports. “‘Siri needs to grow up and get smarter, and by being in other apps it will get smarter because it will know more of what I do,’ said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies in San Jose, California. ‘It’s like quicksand — if you move slightly, you sink deeper. It’s another little thing that gets you more entrenched into the ecosystem.'”
“Apple got a head start when it introduced Siri in 2011. Yet in the years since then it has lost ground to Google Now, which followed in July 2012, and Amazon’s Alexa, unveiled in November 2014,” Webb reports. “Amazon released a software development kit for its virtual assistant a year ago and Google did the same in March, just two months before it announced an Echo competitor called Google Home. A Siri SDK could lay the groundwork for a similar piece of hardware from Apple, according to Royal Bank of Canada analyst Amit Daryanani.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We can’t wait for Siri to shift int a gear the pretenders don’t have (developers, developers, developers!) and speed far away from the pack!
By the way, many of the problems people have with Siri are due to lack of use. It’s a chicken or egg thing. People give up too soon and then Siri can’t learn their language patterns and other important info, so they claim “Siri doesn’t work for me.” You have to let Siri work for you first. A little on-the-job training it all Siri needs for most people with Siri issues.
How to use Siri properly:
• Speak quickly without long pauses
• Correct Siri when it makes a mistake
• Learn and use key commands correctly
• Understand how to use punctuationMore here.
SEE ALSO:
Go ahead, ask Apple’s Siri, ‘What can we expect at WWDC?’ – June 9, 2016
VocalIQ acquisition hints at how Apple’s Siri plans to win the intelligent assistant war – May 30, 2016
Apple reportedly planning huge upgrade for Siri – May 30, 2016
Apple acquires advanced artificial intelligence startup Perceptio – October 5, 2015
Apple buys artificial intelligence natural language start-up VocalIQ – October 2, 2015