Could Apple’s Siri voice recognition be about to steal Google’s crown as the most commonly used search tool? And how will your business be affected?
Apple’s Siri personal assistant may end up changing the way we use our phones, but it – and similar technology from Apple’s rivals – may change the way your customers use the web, too.
In September, Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote to the US Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights to answer some questions about Google’s dominance of the internet search market. In it, Schmidt referenced Siri as being a serious competitor to Google’s search business. This may have had an element of hyperbole about it, but there is no doubt that Siri takes a rather different approach to search than traditional search engines, of which Google is the most popular and profitable.
Using Siri
When you ask Siri a question, it ‘thinks’ for a little while and then returns an answer, but what actually happens during that thought process? Well, initially, Siri analyses your voice using a combination of software running both on your phone and on Apple’s cloud servers. If you have asked for something to do with your phone – such as writing a message to a contact or making a calendar entry – then Siri will send the appropriate instruction to the relevant app. If you have asked a question about something external to your phone, however, things get more interesting.
Siri analyses your query and passes it on to a third party service to actually get the answer. For ‘facts’ (“What’s the capital of Iceland?” “How many days until Christmas?”) Siri uses a combination of Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha. For queries like “Where can I get Chinese takeaway?” it currently (in the US at least) uses Yelp.com’s database of local shops and services, along with its rating system to ensure the best results are selected for you.
This worries Google because the user no longer has to go through its search interface and be exposed to the targeted advertising that actually pays Google’s bills, but should it be worrying you too as a business owner?
The rise of Siri
One study showed that around 50 percent of users had ceased to use Google search since they had started using Siri. If users aren’t going via a search engine, where does this leave your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy?
Siri may be the technology that is grabbing the headlines at the moment, but it really just represents the start of something new. Google itself has had a voice interface for some time, although it currently just passes the spoken text through to its normal search engine. Amazon is also said to very interested in the possibilities that voice search offers and has bought the voice start-up Yap, planning to use its speech recognition in a future product.
SEO and your business
If you are used to using SEO techniques to boost your rankings on Google, Bing or other search engines, get ready to have a rethink. With technology like Siri, you may have to retool your web presence to fit in with whatever rating system its back-end uses to select results. This may mean appealing to crowd-sourced ratings and reviews which, in theory just means that you need to become better at whatever service you offer. In practice, it may mean that there are new and different techniques that businesses will learn to exploit in order to win the search engine game. Get ready to think differently.
Click here for the top business uses for Siri on your iPhone 4S
Stu Houghton
Team communications with One Net Express
Anyone who has ever run a small business will instantly recognise one of the key challenges it presents with regard to team communication. You want to provide the services you offer efficiently and in a cost effective way, and that means keeping overheads low. Read More: One Net Express
