Augmented reality and Apple Pay are big wins. A better voice for Siri? Not so much.
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SAN JOSE — Apple had a chance to pull out its big guns, and really, really beef up personal assistant Siri to take on Amazon Echo and the Google Assistant.
It didn’ t do that Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference. Based on its presentation, and the announcement of a new HomePod speaker which featured amazing sound first and Siri integration second, we’ ll have to call Apple’s feeble attempt at improving Siri the biggest miss of WWDC.
Siri, which has taken a backseat in development to the more aggressive moves by Google and Amazon, will have a new voice in the fall that will have inflections, be able to translate some foreign phrases and offer us several options to queries instead of one.
“I didn’ t care and none of the developers I spoke with cared either, ” says Benoit Vatere, a Los Angeles based app developer. “Siri matters to Apple, (because it’s a feature of the iPhone) but not to us. Nothing changed.”
The new Siri will be introduced in fall as part of the IOS 11 software update, and it will also appear in December, in the new $349 HomePod audio speaker.
It’s starting to feel like Apple wants Siri to fail. So far behind the competition, and HomePod isn’t helping.
Here are nine others in our hit and miss column.
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Checking out the new #homepod Siri speaker #wwdc2017 $349 December pic.twitter.com/sjg2GkJyWs
