Rene Ritchie has been covering Apple and the personal technology industry for almost a decade. Editorial director for Mobile Nations, analyst for iMore, video and podcast host, you can follow him on Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter @reneritchie.
I'm going to do something horrible and re-write the Wall Street Journal, flipping it one-eighty:
AI-powered voice assistants can directly replace interactions with mobile devices. It isn't that screens will go away completely, but screens unattached to objects that can listen, talk back and operate with autonomy will rapidly become obsolete.
Computers we talk to can be anywhere. To work best, they have to be everywhere—at home and in the office, in our cars, on the go. Apple Inc. had a surprise hit with the voice-based assistant Siri and its embodiments, iPhone, iPad, CarPlay, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and most recently, the Mac. Alphabet Inc.'s Google was close behind with OK Google and now Google Assistant on the Pixel and Google Home.
Amazon is clearly aware. It is partnering with other companies to get its own Alexa assistant onto phones and other devices. But the conspicuous absence of such devices with comparable functionality makes it hard to believe Amazon isn't already behind, despite being the darling of the U.S. tech media scene.
Amazon didn't respond to the lack of a request for comment for this article.
I do this not to poke fun but to highlight the incredibly subjective nature of technology reporting. We tend to be ethnocentric at heart and to have trouble balancing multiple truths. Here are a few to juggle:
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Echo is great in the home. It has multiple beam-forming mics, unlimited power, and, needs to understand less than a handful of languages and dialects, and requires conformity of syntax. That makes for great data collection and reliability within a smaller problem space. Speak U.S. English and want to turn your lights off at home? Alexa is the odds on favorite to nail it.
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Siri is great for on-the-go. It's connected to your phone and most of the other computing devices you're likely to have with you, understands a vast range of languages and dialects, and can handle a variety of syntaxes. That makes for incredible convenience and availability within a larger problem space. Speak any number of languages — including multiple concurrent languages now and want to turn off your lights from down the street? Siri has you covered.
Both are attacking the same problem — providing a natural language voice interface that can answer questions and execute commands — but from two very different directions.
Siri doesn't yet offer the same range of third-party integrations but it offers some level of service in many different countries and regions. Alexa doesn't yet offer the same range of countries and regions but offers a few countries a wide range of third party options.
Apple requires you push a button and speak into a controller for its living room device. Amazon lets you simply speak a command word. Apple's approach might make some people feel more comfortable when it comes to security and privacy, Amazon's just feels like magic.
Amazon, by virtue of Echo being a home product, is letting anyone who can talk interact with Alexa. Apple is focusing on the personal, including the rudiments of Voice ID on iPhone and iPad so it can reject commands from everyone but it's single owner.
Neither is doing multi-personal assistance yet. So, by voice alone, it can only give me my calendar, messages, and shopping account, and my roommate their calendar, messages, and shopping account, and never compromise or collide the two.
My point being, we're in the very early days of voice assistants and none of them are very smart yet. Far from artificial intelligences they're more like automatons right now. And if you start really asking, everyone will more than happily tell you how whatever voice assistant they use fails and frustrates them on a regular basis, even as it surprises and delights them enough to keep it around.
Much as my U.S. colleagues love to praise Echo and Dot, they're still not available where I live, so by the same ethnocentricity I'll ding them for not even showing up to play. All's fair in tech and lack of perspective taking, after all.
I'll also point out that, according to the tech industry, Apple is always too late and too early to market for every product. We're terrible at handling boredom so the minute the tablet shipped all we wanted was the watch and the minute that shipped we demanded the car and now the home hub and the minute they ship, we'll tear them apart for being first generation and not living up to the expectations we set in our dreams.
I do think few companies ever see their obsolescence coming. IBM didn't see Microsoft. Microsoft didn't see Google. Google didn't see Facebook. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, but Snapchat eluded them.
And I still think Apple needs a dedicated VP of services experience to make sure Siri is rock-solid on every device, for every query and command, every time.
Apple's been pretty good about not mistaking its products for its business, though. They started transitioning from traditional computers to mobile with iPod. Then they turned iPod into an app on iPhone. They've managed to stay relevant from the Apple II to the Apple Watch.
And while smartwatches in general had a terrible 2016, Apple Watch — despite baffling supply constraints — had a terrific one.
Expectations drive narratives. Apple Watch outselling Amazon Echo by 3x yet Apple Watch is deemed a disappointment vs Echo a raging success.
— Neil Cybart (@neilcybart) November 29, 2016
Apple Watch being the most personal, attached Siri device Apple makes. Except, perhaps, for AirPods, which puts Siri literally in your ear, and with beam-forming mics all Apple's own.
That's what makes voice interface and related devices and services so interesting right now. I mean beyond the tiresome narrative the media keeps clinging to. It's what's fresh and new and will, along with things like augmented reality and real artificial intelligence start to define the next generation of personal technology.
Neither Apple nor Amazon — nor Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Nuance, nor anyone else — are late to that game yet. We're all still figuring it out. We're all still on the Palm V, never mind the BlackBerry or Treo, much less the iPhone.
(Tangent: This year different Android phones will ship with Google Assistant, Samsung Viv, and Amazon Alexa — that's the sign of market still in its formation.)
All that to say, expect more from Apple and Siri in the home and everywhere else when you see it. But don't worry about whether it's early or late. Worry about whether its a great product or not. The winner in any generation of technology only ever arrives exactly when it needs to.
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