“Alexa is everywhere. In your car. In your home. Even your baby monitor. Amazon’s smart assistant already owns around 25 percent of the HiFi speakers market, and its home help hold is growing,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld. “Will Apple take the online retailer on in this sexy sector, or is Siri on iPhone good enough?”
“Apple was pretty much first to enter the smart assistant market with Siri. Since then we’ve seen all the tech titans deliver their own take,” Evans writes. “You could argue that Apple failed to fully exploit its first mover advantage by putting Siri inside more things, while the slow evolution of HomeKit means Cupertino has work to do to put its smarts inside smart homes.”
“Poor Siri even has a public image problem: even though it performs really well against competitors in objective tests, there’s strong public perception that it doesn’,” Evans writes. “These factors and others combine to make it seem like Apple is slow at getting Siri inside the home.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: ‘Tis true that Apple, of late, doesn’t like to move too quickly (or, in certain cases, at all), but we have had iPhones with Siri in our homes since 2011 (and iPads, iPod touches, Apple TVs, and Macs with Siri in our homes in the years since).
That said, as we wrote in March:
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.
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And, as we wrote back in June:
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.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s Amazon Echo echo: What if AirPort Extreme becomes the Siri speaker? – December 1, 2016
Apple abandons development of wireless routers – November 21, 2016