“I like you Siri, you’re going places.” So ends Martin Scorcese’s paid homage to the iPhone’s virtual assistant. With the introduction of Google‘s Voice Search for iOS, Siri’s drawbacks are becoming more evident. The problem is contextual data. Google has (lots of) it and Apple has to buy it in intervals from Yelp, WolframAlpha, Yahoo and Google.
In a test done by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in June (and reported by MacRumors), Google accounted for 60% of Siri’s data diet. Anthony Wing Kosner in this artcle explains the outcome of the test done.
And with Apple, looking to sever ties with Google as much as possible, it gives an impression that Siri is going nowhere.
The Google Search app for iOS now has a voice icon just like its Android built-in equivalent, and it works remarkably well. This is not (yet) a personal assistant. Voice Search only searches the web at present, but with the strong likelihood that a user’s Gmail and Apps data will become searchable (by the user) as well, Google is within striking distance of Siri’s functionality.
Plus, Google has improved its user interface for certain kinds of informational results, like flight tracking and currency conversions, on mobile devices, and now displays them in a nice, big, display box at the top of the screen. These are borrowed from the “cards” in the Google Now built-in app available on the Nexus 7 tablet. And soon, if you search for a popular topic the search results will be broken out in a visual carousel at the top of the page.
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