I have to admit: I am pretty deep in the Apple universe.
Since I bought an iPad 2 for my studies, I am a big iPad fan. The portability of the device is just crazy, when I think what I can do now with my iPad Pro, that’s just incredible. For some travels, I can even leave my notebook at home because my iPad is covering the tasks that I need. Combined with the HDMI adapter, I can even do PowerPoint presentations, the Pencil is just amazing to review and comment documents that are sent to me.
An important component for that is actually Office 365 which enables me to access all my OneDrive-documents while on the road and edit them with Word, Excel, PowerPoint. I know I’m just writing down the marketing words, but it really works well. Of course, here is also room for improvement, but in general: it works!
When I got the Apple Watch 3 last week, I completed Apple’s experience how it’s meant to be. But especially here, I recognised that one thing is really falling behind: Siri. Apple’s assistant should offer you the ability to answer to messages on your watch, even the Mac is now displaying a Siri sign in its TouchBar, showing: You can talk to me!
As my car has CarPlay enabled, I can even use Siri while driving. That is actually quite handsome because I can listen + answer to iMessages, I can tell Siri whom I would like to call…
But unfortunately – and that is my main problem with this whole Siri-story – starting calls and sending iMessages is mainly all I can do with it.
I just found one of the first advertisements of Siri in 2011 and found out that the functions that I mainly use with Siri are already 6 years old.
When you see what Alexa is capable of, it gets pretty obvious where Siri is lacking flexibility and openness: Siri can not interact with Spotify, Siri can not interact with WhatsApp. Honestly, that are two big showstoppers! Spotify is by far the most-used music player. If Siri can’t access it, I’m simply unable to play music via my Apple devices. That feels even worse if you see how my father can use Amazon Alexa on his 29€ Echo Dot to play music via Spotify as default music service! See also a list of german voice commands for alexa: click
Plus, I still do have some friends that are using Android phones. Actually, it’s getting less, but my parents are still not fully Apple-infected. So I need to communicate with them over WhatsApp. I don’t really know whether Apple is blocking here or the App developers are just not getting it done, but the not-openness to 3rd party apps is in my opinion currently one of the most blocking aspects regarding Siri.
I really hope that in the future, Siri ist speeding up in the voice assistant competition. 2018, we will see Apple’s Homepod coming up and if Apple wants to compete here, they really have to teach Siri some new features.
(cover photo by Jason Rosewell on unsplash)
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