Apple Continues to Focus on Expanding Siri’s Third-Party Integration

Apple continues to work to make Siri play well with others. “Others” being third-party apps and services. A new report from The Information tells of Apple’s work to improve Siri’s search capabilities, and on widening its capabilities set.

TechCrunch:

The report points out how the Siri of today can’t do things like book a car rental or make a hotel reservation, or use a messaging app other than Messages to send a text. The improvements to Siri would potentially enable those types of things, enabling third-party integrations that don’t require one-to-one business arrangement between Apple and the external company.

Although Siri can work with third-parties such as OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha, those involved direct deals with those third-parties. That limits the pace for how fast such capabilities can be added to Siri.

Apple is also reportedly working to make Siri more of an actual assistant, and not just a novel feature of their devices. Such features could include intelligent selection as to what to show on a device’s display. If Siri notices you’ve started jogging, she might automatically bring your favorite running app on the screen. Such an ability would be most welcome on a device with a smaller screen, say… An ‘iWatch”?

Both Google and Apple are reported to be working on making their digital assistants, (Google’s is called “Google Now”), just a little more like the one found in the movie “Her.” (Albeit with less awkward lovemakng scenes to be sure. – Ed.)

We will be most interested in seeing what improvements come to Siri as part of Apple’s efforts when iOS 8 is unveiled.

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.