Siri Gives Apple Two Year Advantage Over Android

Hugh Pickens writes "Gary Morgenthaler, a recognized expert in artificial intelligence and a Siri board member, says that Apple 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,' says Morgenthaler. '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.' The 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 adds Morgenthaler. 'There's no company out there they can go buy.' Morgenthaler's comments echo the recent article in Forbes Magazine, 'Why Siri Is a Google Killer' that says that Apple's biggest advantage over any other voice application out there today is the massive data Siri will collect in the next 2 years — all being stored in Apple's massive North Carolina data center — that will allow Siri to get better and better. 'Siri is a new interface for customers wanting to get information,' writes Eric Jackson. 'At the moment, most of us still rely on Google for getting at the info we want. But Siri has a foot in the door and it's trusting that it will win your confidence over time to do basic info gathering.'"

Comments

Apple finally learned how the process works

[suso]

All that the iPhone 4S has shown is that once again it doesn't matter if you have a better product with more features and are first to market with it, its just how you market it.

Re:Iris

[poetmatt]

this is a strength? are you utterly incapable of googling "locksmiths near (address)"? reorganizing existing data doesn't make this thing a magical unicorn, and the fact that iris can do equivalents to this with almost no effort shows how little siri means anything. If anything the reason people probably didn't do much about this is because they never thought it mattered. Just because apple markets something as "OMG AMAZING" doesn't mean everyone else is dumb enough to agree.

mind you, you're suggesting people rely on voice over actually typing on the phone that they could be using to get more specific results for themselves. It's just a change in how your phone *could* be used, if you care.