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. Does Apple management care about Siri becoming the preferred platform as a universal digital assistant outside of Apple products and the App Store? That I’m not sure, they have been incredibly successful with the strategy that owning both hardware and software is a winning formula. Not sure we’ll see a Siri app on Android anytime soon.
So, what is Apple doing with Siri? Quite a bit. As they had done before, in particular when they launched the iPhone and the App Store came more than a year later, focusing on the developers. As their emphasis is on protecting the Apple ecosystem and how products, apps, and services work together, they've started luring developers to the Siri platform and SiriKit. Apple first exposed the Siri API to a small number of applications and integrated Siri with Home Kit to integrate with smart home devices. They allowed certain types of 3rd party apps to be integrated with Siri, one that is frequently mentioned is a ride-sharing app, and they are slowly opening up the SiriKit to more app types. Apple has brought us innovative and revolutionary products but always shown a propensity for not compromising user experience and their entire ecosystem, and rushing things through would jeopardize that. So, even after the slowdown, Apple is not going to rush through features and releases, but we should expect a more sustained flow of improvements. Along the way, we should expect they turn up the volume and show why Siri is not losing the digital assistant battle. Regarding the 10-point comparison table introduced in the original post, here is how Siri fits in:
In regards to how Siri can answer questions on any subject, it uses Wolfram Alpha, a 3rd party, computational knowledge base of data and algorithms that give Siri the ability to answer math, science, trivia questions, and so forth. Siri also uses Wikipedia in some cases, maybe as fallback to Wolfram Alpha’s results. It used to use Bing for search suggestions, now it uses Google Search. The Wolfram Alpha company claims their knowledge base has over a trillion of curated elements but does not separate facts from meta-data and questions associated with those facts. They started building the knowledge base over 30 years ago and released it to the public about ten years ago. Conclusions: Siri will continue to be the preferred digital assistant on Apple products, but not a dominant universal digital assistant platform. By choosing to move some of the ML logic inside the devices Apple is strengthening this strategy and its products. We’re not going to see Siri on Android or other platforms, and therefore Apple is choosing not to compete head to head in the “universal” assistant race. As long as Siri works well and is not incredibly ‘stupid,’ Apple customers will gladly stick with it. But in the meantime, Siri needs to catch up and improve its NLP to understand intents better. Comments are closed.
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