Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
When you first begin using Siri it's not entirely clear what you can do with it. (It's also not clear how to access it.) Yesterday Danny wrote up some initial thoughts/criticisms of the Siri local search experience.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been experimenting with voice input on the iPhone for years — its app shipped with a hidden menu of voice features back in January 2009 — but voice remained an app-level add-on. With Siri, Apple has embedded an assistant at the OS level on the iPhone 4S, which is why Search Engine Land's head-to-head matters: it is the first serious attempt to score the two on actual capability rather than demo videos.
The comparison lands amid unusually broad attention for a feature review — the Wall Street Journal wrote up Siri's conversational humor, 9to5Mac ran video of Siri ported onto the iPhone 4, and a Tumblr of Siri quips was circulating — evidence that the assistant, not the phone hardware, is the story driving iPhone 4S interest. Danny Sullivan's early criticism of Siri's local search experience frames the practical question: when a voice assistant answers, whose search index is doing the work?
First-order effects
- Google Voice Actions, previously the most capable voice option on iOS, now competes against a rival that ships pre-installed and activated by a hardware button on every iPhone 4S.
- Publishers and local businesses face a new discovery surface overnight: Siri's local search results, which Danny flagged as rough out of the gate, become a channel they cannot yet optimize for or opt into.
Second-order effects
- Google must decide whether to answer on Apple's turf — upgrading Voice Actions and its own iOS app — or concede the default-assistant position while keeping voice as one feature among many in its apps.
- If Siri becomes the primary query entry point on iPhones, Apple gains leverage over which search engine answers those queries, turning assistant defaults into a bargaining chip in the Apple-Google search relationship.
Third-order effects
- Voice assistants are shifting from app features to OS-level gateways, meaning control of the assistant increasingly means control of query routing — and the advertising and data that follow it.
- Rival handset makers and search engines will likely treat a bundled assistant as table stakes, pushing the industry toward assistants as a standard platform layer rather than a novelty.
The trend: Mobile assistants are moving from optional app features to default operating-system surfaces that determine whose search engine answers the query.