Mar 26, 2012 at 6:25pm ET by Greg Sterling

Siri is popular but its usage is limited, according new survey research from Parks Associates. The firm surveyed 482 iPhone 4S owners and asked about their usage of the virtual assistant. High level findings from the survey were published today by the Wall Street Journal. Parks Associates found the following: 87 percent iPhone 4S owners use Siri at least monthly Roughly one third of iPhone 4S owners use Siri "almost daily" Initiating calls and texts were the most common Siri-related activities 26 percent use Siri to send email daily More "advanced" functions such as calendaring [...]

Related Topics: Apple: Siri | Google: Android | Google: Voice Search | Top News

WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!

Mar 15, 2012 at 4:26am ET by Danny Sullivan

The Wall Street Journal is out with a story saying that Google is about to make one of the biggest changes in its history of offering web search, providing more direct answers and gaining "semantic" smarts to understand more about what words mean. I'm scratching my head, since Google already does this. Methinks Google's PR has exploded in ways it didn't expect. Beyond Blue Links! From the story, we learn things such as: Over the next few months, Google's search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at [...]

Google Faces “Innovator’s Dilemma” As It Prepares Response To Siri

Mar 5, 2012 at 10:26am ET by Greg Sterling

We've heard the search-related mantra "answers not links" so many times over the past few years that it sounds like a cliche. However in a mobile context the phrase has more meaning: a page of Google search results is ill-suited to the mobile use case. While Google has done many things to make it easier to get data and queries into smartphones with voice search, visual search, specialized apps and Google Instant the company still doesn't deliver "answers." It delivers a mobile-optimized version of its PC experience. Google now faces an "innovator's dilemma" of sorts as it seeks to adapt [...]

Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri?

Dec 13, 2011 at 3:38pm ET by Greg Sterling

As is being widely reported Google has bought startup Clever Sense, which earlier this year launched the local-mobile recommendations app Alfred. Alfred is like "Pandora for the real world" and was dedicated to creating a comprehensive "interest graph." Clever Sense assigns or maps physical places to one another based on styles, characteristics and attributes in the same way that Pandora does for music. However this process is all done by "artificial intelligence." Here's how Clever Sense itself described the functionality behind Alfred: The Extraction Engine built into the Clever S [...]

Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions

Oct 16, 2011 at 12:54pm ET by Greg Sterling

When you first begin using Siri it’s not entirely clear what you can do with it. (It's also not clear how to access it.) Yesterday Danny wrote up some initial thoughts/criticisms of the Siri local search experience. In this piece I'm going to offer some general thoughts comparing Siri (on an iPhone 4S) with Google Voice Actions on my current phone (Android EVO) as well as some head to head examples of queries on both. Siri Leans on Google If you say to Siri, "What can I ask you?" it returns a list of the categories of things it can do. However when I rephrased the question slightly and ask [...]

Related Topics: Apple: Siri | Google: Mobile | Google: Voice Search | Top News

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