Apple’s iPhone 4S announcement was met with groans as many expected the release of the iPhone 5. Those groans changed to wows when Apple showed a live demo of their new “friend”, Siri. Siri’s power lies in it’s power to give customers the ability to get instant answers to questions they have. They can also talk to Siri using “Natural Language”. You don’t have to use codes like “text” to send a text message. You can say Message or some other variation.
If you ask Siri, “What is the time in Irvine, California?” you will receive an instant answer; 8:15 PM in Irvine, California. Ask Siri, “What is Apple’s current stock price?”, you will receive Apple’s current stock price, a daily chart, and other important information pertaining to the stock. What you won’t get are other links to other pages. Google has changed the search engine marketing industry and the marketing industry in general by displaying what they believe is the most relevant links (in the millions in many cases) for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. However, consumers are now hoping for more direct answers to their questions. They do not want to see a list of blue links that seemingly go on forever (how many people even visit page 2 of a search result?). They want to see an answer to the question they are asking.
The late Steve Jobs was asked if Apple is taking on Google with the acquisition of Siri. He responded by saying Siri is “Artificial Intelligence”, not search or speech recognition.” This is true, but Siri is more than just artificial intelligence, it’s a direct attack on Google and their search dominance. Apple has listed Siri as beta, because of hopeful improvements to understanding speech, but also to add hooks to Siri that will allow you to check basketball scores, for example. (“What is score in the Bulls vs. Lakers score” or “Remind me when the Laker game hits halftime) Or “Show me the most popular BBQ Chicken Recipe”. These are a couple of the many hooks Apple can add to Siri. Currently, you can search Yelp restaurants and Wolfram Alpha, which can give you world facts and data. Apple is hoping that adding these hook will stop sending users to Google, but have the answer right on their phone, bypassing Google.
This could be Steve Jobs last move to allow Apple to chip away at the dominance of Google and stop the powerful growth that Android has experienced that last couple of years. Google uses Android as a trojan horse to get people to search using their mobile phones. Siri is Apple’s defense.