Apple’s Siri Makes Competition Play Offense

At the recent AllThingsD conference Andy Rubin, Google’s head of Android, and Microsoft's Windows Phone president, Andy Lee, made some shocking criticisms regarding Apple’s Siri interface . For those who are unfamiliar with Siri, it lets you use your voice to send messages, make calls, and set reminders.

In the Fast Company article “Why Google and Microsoft are Bad Mouthing Apple’s Chatty Siri”  Kit Eaton said:

Such Siri disses have industry punters confused. Lee is definitely targeting the way Apple's Siri uses curated resources to answer some questions, including Wolfram Alpha for slightly more math or fact-based answers, and Yelp for restaurant reviews. But have both executives overlooked the fact that Siri allows searches of Google and Bing (and Yahoo) when it can't find a clever answer that marries Wolfram Alpha's natural language query responses with its own easy-to-use, natural language interface? Lee and Rubin must be nervous.

The voice activated search and the "personal assistant" applications certainly shake up search as we know it. Microsoft and Google are threatened by Siri because its a game changer. Siri represents a new way to interact with your mobile devices that it’s competitors wish they had thought of first.

Enterprise search definitely should take note of the "personal assistant" opportunities.  Luckily, this is not new and companies such as Polyspot are well placed to keep enterprises agile because their infrastructure accomodates the diverse needs to access data and make decisions.

Jasmine Ashton, October 25, 2011