Is Alexa The Next Siri?
There was a time when Apple’s Siri was the undisputed King of the Hill when it came to digital vocal assistants. And while Siri is still the most popular virtual assistant in the U.S. (according to measurement firm Verto Analytics) with 41.4 million monthly active users back in July, the continuing growth of other digital assistants cast doubt on Siri’s future dominance.
Alexa, in particular, is gaining tremendous traction. Verto Analytics found that Alexa’s usage jumped 325% in monthly active users. And while Alexa is still a long way off from knocking Siri off her pedestal, with Amazon behind the wheels, Alexa is bound to keep on growing, glowing, and going.
So how likely is it that Alexa will be the next Siri? Let’s break it down.
SIMILARITIES & DIFFERENCES
Siri and Alexa are digital assistants – as such, their functions tend to overlap. Both can provide answers to basic questions and accomplish simple tasks such telling you about the weather, providing movie times, finding a recipe, checking the latest sports scores, getting directions, and even telling jokes.
More complex undertakings such as ordering food, booking an Uber, casting a video, and arranging meetings can be done, but with varying effectiveness and efficiency. Naturally, the assistants tend to excel in their ‘natural environment’. Give Siri a task that has something to do with the iOS system and she can do it without a hitch. Alexa makes Alexa-enabled devices work smoothly with each other.
Siri comes as a whole – get a new iPhone, update it, and Siri is ready to go. Alexa, on the other hand, needs a bit more attention. Out of the box, it’s quite basic. The good news is that you can install ‘skills’ that considerably heightens its functionality. Find the ‘skill’ that you need for the task you have in mind, install it, and let Alexa do her thing. Because of this ability to add ‘skills’, Alexa is the most customizable digital assistant out there.
The two assistants also differ in focus. Siri is primarily on your iPhone, and its competence shines on the tasks that you expect your iPhone to be able to do. Alexa, on the other hand, targets your home – if you buy Alexa-enabled devices for your home, you’ll basically have an invisible butler that can do basic tasks in your home.
GROWTH & CONCERNS
With a current stock market value of over $820 billion, Apple Inc. is set to become the first trillion-dollar company in history. Expectations for future iPhones continue to grow strong, and Siri, as Apple’s iconic digital assistant, will play an important role in hitting that goal.
On the other hand, Alexa has the freedom of being untethered to a particular manufacturer. You can download Alexa from both iOS store and Google Play to manage Alexa-enabled devices, which, (and here we find even more freedom) can be made by Amazon or by other manufacturers. This presents incredible growth opportunities for Alexa. As more households become ‘smarter’, more devices could be Alexa-enabled.
As for concerns, Siri has continued to improve through the years – that’s why criticisms against it are more nuanced, such as the system’s difficulty in understanding certain accents (Scottish, for example), instead of something fundamental.
Alexa’s opportunities for improvement center more on its core. For example, there are far less Alexa-enabled devices in the US (about 3 million compared to Siri’s 40plus million devices) when we talk about monthly usage. Alexa’s ‘always listening’ feature is also a huge concern for many users. While you can activate and use Alexa anytime that a device is within earshot, the fact that Alexa is always listening is a huge privacy red flag.
SEIZE THE FUTURE
Both Siri and Alexa are powered by titans in their fields. Both can struggle outside of their native environments. Both can reasonably do the tasks they promised to deliver. So, with their similarities and differences, growth outlook and concerns, which vocal assistant is set to seize the future and rule it?
The answer may lie in whichever assistant will learn to share.
You see, when you pick a device – say, the iPhone X – and start using the voice assistant native to it, you’re not just making a decision for this particular device, you’re likely making a choice for your future gadgets.
When you start using the digital voice assistants, they learn from you – what time you usually wake up, what news you like to read with your breakfast, how you commute to work, how much physical activity you usually rack up, what type of music you jam to, which games you’re likely to spend time on, even the food that you order – and all these things would help these assistants serve you better.
But while you’re using/teaching Siri, you’re neglecting Alexa, or Microsoft’s Cortana or the Google Assistant. And sure, you can switch platforms down the road, but to do so would mean that you’d have to go through the whole exercise again – your new voice assistant will have to learn that you’re interested in Ginebra the basketball team instead of the Ginebra the gin, and that you never ever take the train on a Friday payday. As intelligent as these voice assistants are, they hoard data like a dragon hoards treasure. They know user information is the goldmine to the future – and they refuse to share.
Remember how much of a hassle it was to transfer your phone directory to the GSM phones of yore? Now, migrating our contacts is only a tap of a button away. And while I understand the temptation of protecting one’s ‘proprietary’ data to safeguard one’s own business, every time a company pulls up their drawbridge, another could seize the opportunity and come up with a universal standard.
It’s going to happen anyway. In the EU, the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifies that users have the right to data portability – the user’s “right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance”. Doesn’t it make sense to get a leg up on legislation/industry trend and enhance user convenience today?
Digital voice assistants are the heralds of how we interact with our phones and homes in the future. Whoever sheds the limitations of the present as quickly as possible is poised to be in a better position in the future.