Siri Gives Apple a Two-Year Advantage Over Google, Says VC

[FdmNews 0]

Could Siri, the voice-based virtual assistant for every iPhone 4S owner, constitute a threat to Google’s Android operating system?

Absolutely, says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, recognized expert in artificial intelligence, and a Siri board member and investor. Apple, he argues, now has at least a two-year advantage over Google in the war for best smartphone platform.

“What Siri has done is changed people’s expectations about what’s possible,” Morgenthaler said in an interview with Mashable. “Apple has crossed a threshold; people now expect that you should be able to expect to speak ordinary English — and be understood. Siri has cracked the code.”

This threshold, from mere speech recognition to natural language input and understanding, is one that Google cannot cross by replicating the technology or making an acquisition. “There’s no company out there they can go buy,” Morgenthaler says.

Google has Voice Actions, a voice search application for Android. So what’s the big difference? It comes down to semantics, Morgenthaler says: “Siri understands what you mean.” She has a far more precise understanding of what you’re saying and the context you’re saying it in, in other words.

Morgenthaler calls Google’s Voice Actions a “capable speech recognition program,” and says it was the state-of-the-art voice-based user interaction program. That was, until Siri, with all her semantic prowess, debuted on iPhone 4S. (Of course, Morgenthaler may well have a financial stake in Siri’s future; the terms of the company’s sale to Apple were never disclosed.)

Currently, Google is making dismissive public pronouncements about Siri: “your phone shouldn’t be your assistant,” Android chief Andy Rubin told the AsiaD Conference. But Morgenthaler believes they’re scrambling to catch up behind the scenes, because Apple won’t stand still with this technology.

Rather, it will use Siri to solidify the strength of its platform and steal advertising dollars away from Google, he argues. “Siri is a platform,” Morgenthaler says. “It’s not just limited to those things that Apple has done at launch.”

SEE ALSO: I Want My Siri TV: Is Apple Aiming to Make the Remote Obsolete?

At the moment, Siri has a lot of iPhone-centric functions. But Siri the company implemented more than 45 APIs prior to being acquired by Apple — meaning the possibilities of a conversation interface to the web are endless. Back in April 2010, just after the Apple acquisition, Mashable noted Siri’s potential role as a driver in mobile search.

“Apple has the opportunity to outmode the entire Android ecosystem,” Morgenthaler says. Of course, that hinges on Apple making those APIs available to iOS developers, but he believes Apple will do just that: “This will be the differentiating factor in the iOS platform.”

Siri’s threat to Google could reach further than Android. In fact, Siri challenges Google’s entire search empire and shakes it to the foundation, Morgenthaler says.

“Google has made a huge contribution to all of our lives … they’ve made search comprehensive and instantaneous … but the whole paradigm is wrong,” he says. “[People] don’t want a million blue links, they want one correct answer. All the rest is noise that you’d rather have go away.

“Apple has the opportunity to really understand the question that you’re asking, and apply semantic knowledge such that [siri] will deliver you the right answer, or a small set of highly relevant answers.”

When that happens, Morgenthaler says, all the steps that typically comprise an online search, including the ads served against search results, become completely irrelevant. He believes Apple can and will circumvent this search experience, passing consumers to merchants by way of Siri — and earning a finders fee for doing so. Under this paradigm, Google could be completely forgotten.

In short, forget the search engine — Siri will be an answer engine. She can perform executable actions and change consumer expectations in the process.

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BONUS: Siri Politely Answers 10 Absurd Questions

The classic question

 

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[gogoblender 3,070]

Got an Iphone 4s? Starting to use Siri over Google? This news topic that showed up had me reading deep into a ton of other topics around the net just to see where search is going. I'm a little amused that the first reactions to the new Iphone were that it was a dud because it didn't get a new facelift, and as it turns out beauty is really skin deep.

 

Apple's big surprise secret weapon is only now begun to be seen, a new way of looking at mobile phones, computing, and how to access, and in fact speak to data. There's been some great comparisons done with same terms for Sir versus Google, with Siri coming up with some very meaningful answers, instead of Google's usual list of ten links that we have to click

 

Does anyone have one of the new Iphones here, any feedback on this?

 

 

gogo

[Dragon Brother 619]

I actually read somewhere recently than an android developer had over a period of a couple of days produced something that was fairly similar to Siri and were working on improving it. I don't know if 2 years is a feasible number to be honest. At the rate which things change these days it might give them half that at most. Depends how well (if they do add something similar which you would think they would) google does it.

 

EDIT: Also, has fetch been renamed?

[gogoblender 3,070]

I've been doing a bit more reading. Apparently the closest that google has to Siri is something called Google Voice Actions.

 

And here's the results of a head to head test

 

Siri versus Google Voice Actions

 

And the winner is...

 

 

gogo

[Dragon Brother 619]

Here's the bit I read the other day about the android version some independent developers produced.

 

Android Developers Create Siri Rival "Iris" in 8 Hours

 

It makes apple seem not so special...

[gogoblender 3,070]

heh, I just got to that. Siri iris siri iris...

 

 

gogo

[chattius 2,526]

Murphy's law for coding: you need 1% of time to do 99% of the code. The rest 1% is full of bugs and you have to waste 99% of your time to remove them. So be careful if you see previews of programs

[Dragon Brother 619]

Murphy's law for coding: you need 1% of time to do 99% of the code. The rest 1% is full of bugs and you have to waste 99% of your time to remove them. So be careful if you see previews of programs

 

That sounds about right, although the preview video they show does look promising.