It’s something many (including me) have been calling for, and now the Woz, Apple’s co-founder has also stepped up the plate and asked for it – Siri working with third party apps.
A publicly available Siri API would really fully unleash the untapped potential of Siri. It must be pretty frustrating for developers to be restricted, as the possibilities are endless.
Off the top of my head, I can think of several applications that would benefit from Siri integration.
You’re trying to cook, have sticky/dirty hands and you don’t want to have to touch your iPad to access the cooking app. You could then ask Siri ‘When do I have to add eggs to this recipe?’ without having to wash your hands.
Or how about online grocery stores? There are more and more of them with apps nowadays. Imagine if you could just give Siri your shopping list, and then all the goods would arrive on your doorstep.
This is perhaps a more specialized one, but if you are highly skilled at chess, a chess app could take advantage of Siri to tell you the moves, then you would play in your head, without the need for a board.
It isn’t hugely logical why Apple hasn’t done anything about it yet. After all, it has released APIs and developer kits for most of its other services, iCloud, for instance. You would think Siri is a prime example of a service devs can build on.
I really hope Apple does something about this for iOS 7. It’s the next step that needs to be taken to really unleash Siri.
