In a series of posts analyzing what is happening in the digital assistant platform race, this post discusses Apple Siri.
Apple pioneered the personal digital assistant space when they launched Siri in 2011 on their iPhone 4S. It received kudos and funny jokes from all parts of the industry, but overall it was a success. Steve Jobs lured the founders of Siri into Apple in 2010, but to everyone's surprise, the original Siri founders, and rest of the team, started leaving Apple soon after the launch of the iPhone 4S. It is fair to assume, based on the recent announcements of Viv Labs, that the Siri team realized that their objective to make Siri a universal digital assistant for everyone was not Apple’s objective. Apple interest in Siri was another Jobs' genial moment that saw better devices and better user experiences because of Siri. Siri helped Apple sell more products by improving products' user experience and help customers become more productive. The departure of the Siri team must have created some internal challenges at Apple and possibly the reason for the slowdown and the subsequent slow reaction to Alexa. Even after this turbulence though many still see Siri as a smarter digital assistant than Alexa. Considering that iPhones are still selling like hotcakes, Mac has reached a remarkable 7% market share, and Watch is slowly displacing FitBit as the preferred activity tracker, I would say that Siri is not driving customers away for sure. Apple management is not losing sleep over Siri's challenges, but they recognize it needs to keep pace for the simple reason of not allowing competitors an opportunity to encroach on their customer base. |
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