The iPhone 4S launched with the much rumored voice assistant ‘Siri‘ becoming reality. For Apple, Siri and iCloud is a step towards Google’s domain. Cloud computing, web and web services. At the same time Siri helps you get answers and currently it syncs with Wolfram alpha and Yelp before running a Google search (Yahoo and Bing are also included). Clearly Google has a reason to worry, specially since 2/3rd of their mobile traffic comes from iOS.
So when at Andy Rubin takes shows up at AllthingsD’s AsiaD, he tries to downplay Siri and we so wish that he had a better argument to back up his claim. Rubin commented that the phone is a tool for communicating and one shouldn’t be communicating with the phone instead.
He basically tried to suggest that one isn’t supposed to interact with Siri on the iPhone but with others using the device as a phone. Certainly! If making calls was the only objective of the handheld, even my 10 yr old Nokia does that for me. The hogwash from Rubin takes us a decade back and far away from mobile computing. Dear Andy, Siri makes computing easy, it connects, it gets things done .. it makes life easy!
Incidentally last time I saw a demo of someone talking into their iPhone to get things done was in this video:
[youtube]GQ3Glr5Ff28[/youtube]
Yes the Google mobile app. It is clear that Google itself is keen on voice controls and natural language innovation. However Apple won the race to acquire Siri against Google! Apple has managed to get a superior voice assistant in the iPhone and Rubin trying to downplay the same in this manner is nothing but shameful. For one to show its innovation, you need not ridicule the other!