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With Apple's Siri, A Romance Gone Sour (nytimes.com)
13 points by nickbilton on July 15, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



> Side-by-side comparisons, in videos posted on YouTube, give the upstart from Google the advantage.

I'm not sure why people think Google Voice Search is the "upstart" here; it's been available on Android far longer than Siri's been on iOS. It just doesn't have a cute little persona and marketing team behind it.

Google's been doing voice recognition and search for a number of years now (Google Voice anyone?), and are market leaders in search with good reason. It's neither news nor surprising that Google's offering trumps Apple's.

What this really demonstrates is the power of the Apple marketing machine. They have people believing that they practically invented the mobile voice search, and have firmly associated in peoples' heads it with an anthropomorphized character, which makes the experience more relatable and easier to write about. Now that people are discovering that it's not all the marketers cracked it up to be, they're discovering that companies who actually have this technology as a core competency do it faster and better, but Siri has served its purpose - it sold iPhones, and gave iPhone owners a jolt of that Apple experience that keeps them coming back for more.




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