Can Apple’s Siri Stand Up To The Chatbot Competition?

Apple’s take on the AI personal assistant, better known as Siri, is more powerful than it’s ever been, but is it enough to keep up in the chatbot race?

There’s no doubt Siri has made some major moves and has a host of new features to boot.

With the new iOS 10 release, Siri has the ability to control more third-party apps, and the release of MacOS Sierra finally makes Siri available on the desktop, where she can assist with basis system tasks. Apple users will also find a speedier Siri on their Apple Watch and can look forward to Siri integrating with Apple’s new wireless AirPods when they arrive in October.

Though Apple is looking to make strides in Siri’s conversational computing capabilities, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday (Sept. 20) that the voice assistant still has progress to make — especially when compared to offerings from both Google and Amazon.

When it comes to things like the number of third-party mobile apps Siri is able to command, no third-party app control on the Mac and the strength of its predictive intelligence, WSJ said there is still room for Siri to grow.

But as the chatbot space heats up, that may need to happen sooner rather than later.

The media says that apps are out and bots are in.

Earlier this week, our very own Karen Webster noted some unspoken advice to digital players: If you’re not botting, you’re rotting.

The tough part is: Chatbots, for the most part, are still pretty primitive in a lot of ways.

The longer it takes for bots to get smarter and less tedious to use, the greater the risk that consumers will decide that messaging apps are best suited for their stellar core functionality — sending messages and responding to them and adding emoticons when appropriate, Webster explained. Unless, of course, that’s just the path bots are destined to take: to become relevant calls to action on behalf of the consumer versus a standalone ecosystem where consumers start their search for the things they want to buy.

It seems like we’ll have to wait and see if the intelligent “commerce aggregation” layer that bots were envisioned to be actually comes to fruition.