Siri and Search

Gary Morgenthaler had a few interesting statements to make:

“Therefore, when Siri was an independent company, its plan was to map these domains deeply and seamlessly to automate transactions for its users within them. For example, “Buy that Steve Jobs biography book and send it to my dad”; “Send a dozen yellow roses to my wife”; “Book me the usual table for 2 tonight at 8 p.m. at Giovanni’s”; and “Get me 2 box seats for the Giants game on Saturday.”

Then comes the question of what solves our biggest problems. Ultimately, Siri’s value is that of automation and removing “friction” on the Internet. Siri achieves this by: (1) understanding speech input in natural language form, (2) mapping user requests against its knowledge base (i.e., ontological domains) and (3) activating software “agents” to interact with Internet service providers to fulfill user requests.”

Source: TechCrunch

Let’s just forget Google for a minutes and focus in on this combination of technologies.

• Understand.

• Map.

• Act.

That’s the general design pattern for a whole range of applications.

Certainly nothing new here.

They’ve solved a good problem. There are certain use cases for which Siri is a great solution.

He ignores the rest of the problem space. And that’s just fine. I don’t expect him to point out the subset of infinite use cases that Siri is woefully inadequate for.

Barriers, like a small keyboard, are soon to be resolved by virtual keypads and a range of next generation hand gestures that are sensed, not tactically received. I don’t see them as insurmountable.

Even Star Trek TNG made use of both voice and physical commands.

Siri is not a Google-search killer.

It is a nice complement.