What Siri wants to be when she grows up.....

The blogosphere has been heaping praise on Siri with most of the coverage going to the humorous responses built into the AI engine. All very interesting but none of it gets to the heart of why Siri is there in the first place. Some people in the media seem to spend every waking hour trying to predict what Apple might do next and where they might go. Interestingly in hindsight most things seem pretty obvious. Features are added for a bigger purpose and it takes us all a while to see what that might be.

In the case of Siri I think we are seeing a real glimpse into the future of iOS. Firstly and most obviously Siri provides voice control. It does it first where it is most needed, a phone. It is a touch device that we have a very real need to use when we cannot touch it or even see it. But there are other devices that fit into that category too. Most critically the ones that are not or will ever be touch screen enabled. The Mac mini and the MacBook (or more simply desktops and laptops) for example. Or how about the most rumored of all devices, the TV. more on that later.

Siri is also a close relative of the Star Trek computer. Ask her a question and she tries to get you the answer. We have had  the ugly stepsister for quite a long time. It is called Google search. That company in Mountain View has built an advertising business around that ability but its weakness is the front end. Android has Voice Actions but how many late night talk shows did you see cover that?

This brings me back to TV and something Google already knows. TV is no longer about live broadcast networks. The TV is the thing that hangs on my wall. It is capable of showing many kinds of media, TV being just one of them. When we say we love TV we don't mean the physical device, we mean the content and that content now includes youtube, streaming video, games, apps, photos and everything else that needs a screen.
That amount of content faces serious discovery problems and so for next generation TV, search is the killer feature.

All this then suggests that to revolutionize TV will require access to any kind of content with simple voice control from any device, not just that big screen in your living room. Siri has a little bit of growing up to do but the potential is clear.

As an aside, most predictions for Apple's TV play seem to focus on how it will integrate cable, broadcast TV, and physical disks. Simply it won't and it has no need to. Have you checked the App Store recently?