Bijan Sabet

Some thoughts about Siri

One of the most interesting things about my new iPhone 4S is Siri

After a week or so of playing with Siri, here’s are my quick observations:

1. Siri is fun. Siri has personality. It’s not just speech recognition. She has attitude and her own voice.

2. Siri plus geofencing is killer. I use Siri in the car. My common use is “remind me to xyz when I get home”.

One example: the other night, Lauren and I were out for dinner on a date. Kids were at home with the babysitter. My daughter called me and told me she lost her tooth. I was in the car when the call came. When I got off the phone, I said to Siri: “remind me to put $5 under ellie’s pillow when I get home”.

After dinner, we saw a movie and I forgot about the tooth (i know, bad dad). The moment I walked into the house, i got a push notification with the reminder. Fucking magical.

3. Siri isn’t always accurate. This is a problem. I try to use Siri a lot. And right now it works best in a quiet room like my car. If the room isn’t quiet, I’m getting very mixed results. The other issue, is the back end seems to be having scaling issues. Between the network and inaccuracy, that is a meaningful obstacle to get users to change behavior.

4. Siri needs to open up. The iPhone became awesome when the App Store launched. There are many critics about the App store model (including me) and for good reason. But the reason why it works is because for the most part the App Store is open.

Now Siri needs to open up. We need API’s. I want to replace Yelp data with Foursquare data with Siri. I want to tweet with Siri without a hack. I want to play music on any web service i choose with Siri. The list goes on.

There are folks that consider Siri a real threat to Google. That may happen. Any time search queries go outside of Google its a threat.

But Siri v1.0 isn’t a threat. But what it represents is something beyond interesting.

I just can’t stop thinking about the possibilities.