What Siri Could Learn From Thanos
Relying on one voice assistant to rule them all might be expecting too much
To borrow from J.R.R. Tolkien, voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google all aspire to be a little bit like Sauron from Lord of the Rings. If you distill all of their differing methodologies down, they ultimately come down to this: One ring (or, if you will, one A.I.) to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
That is to say, every voice assistant out there is competing to be your only voice assistant through which you route all of your requests. So if you want to use your Amazon Echo to turn off your Philips Hue smart lights, you say something like, “Alexa, turn off my living room lights” and behind the scenes, Alexa translates the request and routes the command to Philips in a format it can understand.
As of iOS 12, Siri also works this way. Through the power of Siri Shortcuts, you can set up a macro so that, for example, when you say, “Hey Siri, play How Did This Get Made,” the most recent episode of the How Did This Get Made podcast automatically begins playing in your podcast app of choice. And even without setting up a shortcut, you can use Siri almost like a voice-only command line, to say things like, “Hey Siri, using Drafts, create a draft in Inbox using clipboard,” and it’ll save…
