Right now if you ask anybody about what’s the best AI-powered voice assistant out there in the market, they’d bounce between just two prominent alternatives — Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. And that is completely true. Apple may have popularized the AI assistant trend with the debut of Siri but its capabilities have been lagging behind its competitors over the past couple years.
With Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) kicking off this Monday, Cupertino is expected to announce the expansion of the functionality of its widely-known voice assistant Siri. While the company has kept its technologies closed to invasion from third-party apps, it did take a first step towards opening the voice assistant to such integrations last year.
Apple is now expected to build upon the same, making Siri capable of interacting seamlessly with a wide variety of apps, reports Reuters. This is one of the most anticipated announcements of the developer conference as the technology world now has its eyes set on Apple to witness the direction it will take to compete against the voice assistant who’ve found a place in our homes.
But, the report mentions that one should not expect anything out of the blue because Apple is expected to stick to its guns and only expand on the feature set it has perfected. It will keep the features restricted and not go all out. Don’t expect Cupertino to debut a ‘skill’ store like Amazon or the ‘Explore’ section like Google, says Reuters. The report mentions the same as under:
But the Cupertino, California company is likely to stick to its tested method of focusing on a small amount of features and trying to perfect them, rather than casting as wide a net as possible, according to engineers and artificial intelligence industry insiders.
Currently, Siri is known to work with only six different types of app categories — ride-hailing and sharing, messaging and calling, photo search, payments, fitness, and auto infotainment systems. This means you can ask the voice assistant to book you an Uber taxi or send a WhatsApp message using simple commands like — ‘Hey Siri, please order me a ride to the train station’ or ‘Send a Whatsapp message to xyz person.’
Apple has tested the limited set of capabilities over the past years and is now comfortable enough to hand over control of its voice assistant to an even larger partner base. Siri will soon support more categories, but we do not particularly know what they’d be. It could be highly possible that food delivery, music discovery and other such features will come to your iPhone or iPad or some new hardware.
Yes, that rumor has also been floating around the interwebs. In addition to talking about its upgraded software capabilities, we are also expecting Apple to debut its own Siri-powered speaker to have a fleeting (undermining Apple’s brand presence) chance to take over a chunk of the smart home speaker space. While asking for an app store might be a far cry but Apple we’d love to see you step out of your comfort zone and embrace change. Waiting eagerly!
For extensive coverage of WWDC 2017, stay tuned and return back for updates on that front. Till then, comment down below your expectations from Siri. Let’s discuss it out.
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