During Google I/O 2016, the Google Home was unveiled, a compact home assistant that could rival the functions of Amazon Echo. With all this buzz about smart home assistants carrying out the basic of tasks to simplify human living, Apple has yet to bring itself into the fold, probably because it has not opened its Siri API to developers for 3rd party integrations.
However, according to the latest report from BGR, Apple finally start to open up its digital assistant platform to developers in order to produce a smart home assistant that could take on both the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Currently, Apple has locked down Siri from third-party implementations and apart from being integrated with the company’s own HomeKit, there is not much functionality coming from Siri’s side that could actually make it challenge Amazon Echo or Google Home.
However, Apple might not even need to do this because one other report reveals that that the company could be working on a separate device altogether, and by integrating Siri to it, could open up a lot of doors for developers and for the product itself to be the ultimate challenger for the smart home assistant. One of Apple’s biggest strengths will also become its biggest weakens down the road. Since Apple does not open up its software to developers, security issues are minimized, but that also prevents the software from growing any further.
If Apple wants Siri to grow and develop to the point that it will actually jump into the minds of consumers when they think of purchasing smart home assistants, the company is going to have to be extremely flexible when providing the API to developers. It is possible that during WWDC 2016, Apple could bring not only consumers, but developers some much-awaited news regarding branching out its digital speech assistant to developers to further improvements.
Perhaps in the future, we could use Siri to order Pizza or Chinese, but this form of progress lies in the hands of Apple and nobody else.