Apple’s WWDC introduced new options for Siri and I’ll take a look at how that compares to the rest of the voice assistant world. Also, a brief look at Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn.

WWDC 2016 and Siri

This year’s WWDC¹ was interesting. No big shocking announcements but with a good focus on developers (instead of a 45 minute Music segment nobody enjoyed). I’m not going to talk about the new versions of iOS, macOS², tvOS, and watchOS. For those I recommend you have a look at MacStories' extensive reviews.

Instead I’ll briefly go into some of the developer focused things. Before I do so, first the usual disclaimer when talking about Apple: yes I’m sure Android/Windows/whatever had all this stuff years ago or that it’s nothing special that nobody needs bla bla bla don’t care.

This year a lot of iOS was opened up for developers, chief among them Messages, Siri, Maps, and the lock screen. While I’m looking forward to having widgets and see how the Maps integrations will work out, the most interesting ones are Messages and Siri. Messages because of how much it’s used, and how important messaging apps are in general, and Siri as a juxtaposition to Alexa and Google Assistant.

As I want to keep this fairly brief, I’ll only focus on Siri and how this will fit it into the voice assistant world. With the rise of Alexa in the Echo, voice assistant tools have gotten a lot more attention and this was increased when Google introduced their Assistant and the upcoming Google Home. Alexa³ is built to be as open as possible, in a reflection probably of AWS. Alexa provides the underlying services (two of them, the voice service and the skill service that you can build functionalities on) and expects people to do the rest. And obviously they have, with over 1200 skills currently available. The downside here is that using these skills means that you have to use specific words to trigger them, in (American) English.

I haven’t really found much on the Assistant/Home API, but I suspect it will have a similar approach where they will let people build whatever they want. It’s hard to say exactly what will be possible, but I expect that it will focus on their extensive machine learning capabilities with great integration of other Google products. Again, the Home is also going to be US only at launch, but at least Google has a decent track record of not waiting too long before they release good products in other countries⁴.

Siri on the other hand will only be available for several types of apps. This limitation is intentional and will likely expand, but it shows a very different approach. The biggest difference however is in how they approach it. Instead of having the app decide exactly what they should listen for, Siri will allow apps to have triggers and it will decide if the user calls for that trigger to be activated. So, instead of expecting “Hey Siri, call me an Uber ride” the Uber app would have a trigger for “ride call”. The big advantage of this is obviously internationalization. It means that you don’t need to ensure your app understands Dutch or Japanese, but instead you let Siri do the hard work for that.

Now, that is a pretty cool thing, but on the other side is that limitation of only a few types of apps. While I applaud the structure of Siri’s integration and the ability to use it in many countries, I would have preferred if that could be combined with Amazon’s openness. It will be interesting to see how these 3 different systems compare a year from now. Right now Alexa is the only one actually in use, and Amazon has a tendency to update their services frequently. Will multi language support come to Alexa and Google Home/Assistant first or will that still be the same when Apple hopefully opens up Siri more at the next WWDC?

Lastly, I just want to point out Playgrounds. This app for learning/practicing coding on an iPad looks great, and I’m looking forward to playing with it.

Microsoft buys LinkedIn

Honestly, I expected this week was going to be all about WWDC and then Microsoft decides to make its biggest acquisition, upstaging Apple during one of its main events. Considering how often Apple’s news drowns out others I can’t help but enjoy that⁵.

This article by James Allworth neatly shows at least one reason why LinkedIn is so valuable to Microsoft: it will allow them to match all that valuable data to their CRM offering. Considering everyone⁶ has a LinkedIn account and they keep it updated (at least when they switch job) that makes Microsoft CRM product a lot more accurate than others. That should definitely give them an advantage in that market.

Unlike Nokia (their last really big acquisition), this also matches the direction Nadella is taking Microsoft. Away from a Windows everywhere world and instead trying to become a major service provider. Of course, it will be a while before we can see anything happen from this, but there is certainly some good potential.

Other

Chef launched a new tool called Habitat. While I do want to talk about that, this note is long enough so I’ll put that off for next week, together with any news that might come out of Dockercon. On that note, Dockercon has a live stream that you might want to check out.