Apple continues to work to make Siri play well with others. “Others” being third-party apps and services. A new report from The Information tells of Apple’s work to improve Siri’s search capabilities, and on widening its capabilities set.
The report points out how the Siri of today can’t do things like book a car rental or make a hotel reservation, or use a messaging app other than Messages to send a text. The improvements to Siri would potentially enable those types of things, enabling third-party integrations that don’t require one-to-one business arrangement between Apple and the external company.
Although Siri can work with third-parties such as OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha, those involved direct deals with those third-parties. That limits the pace for how fast such capabilities can be added to Siri.
Apple is also reportedly working to make Siri more of an actual assistant, and not just a novel feature of their devices. Such features could include intelligent selection as to what to show on a device’s display. If Siri notices you’ve started jogging, she might automatically bring your favorite running app on the screen. Such an ability would be most welcome on a device with a smaller screen, say… An ‘iWatch”?
Both Google and Apple are reported to be working on making their digital assistants, (Google’s is called “Google Now”), just a little more like the one found in the movie “Her.” (Albeit with less awkward lovemakng scenes to be sure. – Ed.)
We will be most interested in seeing what improvements come to Siri as part of Apple’s efforts when iOS 8 is unveiled.
