Siri’s new iphone app “puts a personal assistant in your pocket,” to quote TechCrunch. While reading about this new app, I felt like I was in a science fiction movie. Siri’s new phone app allows iphone users to talk requests, such as reserving movie listings, booking restaurant reservations, and finding local businesses. The idea of speaking voice commands to a virtual receptionist at a business already seems natural to us. But the concept of conversing with a phone app to schedule your daily activities takes the power of speech-to-text technology one step further – into the realm of your personal routine.
From a marketing analyst’s perspective, the ever-changing nature of an individual’s dialogue of commands used to generate desired information is quite fascinating.
In the past few decades, search engines have trained people to frame their information requests by choosing a few keywords or phrases that capture the essence of the question that they are trying to solve. The popularity of text messages and twitter drives people to interact with each other, both on a personal and professional level, through abbreviations and short hand texting. Now Siri is bringing interactions back to the world of voice, whereby people will frame their requests by speaking a short natural sentence. The novelty in today’s use of voice is that the conversation is not occurring between two people, but rather between an individual and his/her iphone app.
An interesting implication for marketers to think about is how quickly people adapt to products with new modes of interaction. Siri’s marketing of this conversational interface, built on $24 million dollars of venture capital, shows that in today’s world of texting people still believe in the market need for dialogue by voice.
Read reviews of Siri’s new iphone app on ZDnet and TechCrunch.
Related posts:
- Voice is Coming Back in Style with iPhone Apps and Google’s Nexus One
- How to Advertise on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch: Whistle’s iPhone App
- Ben & Jerry’s Moo Vision iPhone App
- Google Voice Enters the iphone – Through the Web Browser
- iPhone 4: Marketing Questions in Real Time
