Pressure builds to ‘solve voice’

devices on an ongoing basis.

So on the eve of the Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple touts all the cool new things app makers get to do in 2017 with software updates, the company is expected to put the spotlight on a newer, improved Siri, one analysts expect to be more responsive and chattier.

The company really needs to get Siri up to par and “solve voice, or they become irrelevant,” says Peter Pham, of Science Inc., a Los Angeles-based tech incubator.

Apple’s early entry into voice assistants, and the prevalence of iPhone, still make it the most commonly used and liked voiceactivated digital assistant.

According to a survey by SurveyMonkey Audience for USA TODAY, of the 92% of respondents who are familiar with the top voice assistants, one third use Siri the most, compared to 19% for Google Assistant, 6% for Alexa and 4% for Cortana.

When asked which assistant they can’t live without, Siri wins by a long shot.

There’s a big asterisk to these results: There are simply more devices in circulation that have Siri built in than any other assistant.

“I like Siri,” says Sabreyna Reese from Kansas City, Mo., who uses Siri to call people and text. “She does what I tell her to do.”

But for Tobias Nasgarde, a college student from Stockholm, studying in Los Angeles, he’s pretty much given up on Siri.

“My iPhone is Swedish, and sometimes she thinks I’m back home in Stockholm.”

Christina Brown, also from Kansas City, is happy with the results, but doesn’t turn to Siri too often.

“All she does is search, so why not just type it in myself ?”

In our SurveyMonkey survey, among reasons users gave for not using Siri, 13% said it was easier to just type, while 7% said she couldn’t translate the voice accurately. The majority — 56% — said they didn’t have a device that used it.

Apple’s challenge is to prove to consumers that voice search is useful and time-saving.

Many consumers told USA TODAY that Alexa does a better job of understanding them.

Creative Strategies president and Apple analyst Tim Bajarin chalks that up to hardware.

The Echo speakers have a better, larger built-in microphone than the internal iPhone mic, and most people give orders to her in a quiet room — their kitchen, as opposed to the phone, which is generally outside, he says.

Apple could solve that with its answer to Alexa this year with a talking speaker.

Gene Munster, who runs the Minneapolis-based Loup Ventures, says he believes consumers will be eager to buy.

“How people are interacting with machines is changing, from the mouse and keyboard to voice and gestures,” he says.