14 DAY TRIAL // The iPhone 4S may only be an evolution of the very popular iPhone 4, a disappointment to the legions of Apple fans that were awaiting the iPhone 5, but who nonetheless queued up to buy the 'less impressive' model in record numbers, but it's packing at least one really cool feature, Siri, the voice-activated 'personal assistant.'
It's an impressive technology, certainly not something new though, but it's probably the first time anyone got voice commands, on a phone, right.
You can ask Siri anything and it will try to answer. Ask for the weather and you get a Yahoo weather widget, try to find a place and you get a Yelp entry and so on.
It's pretty smart and it gets things right a lot of times. But sometimes it can't find what you're looking for or it simply doesn't understand what you want. In those cases, it points you towards a Google Search.
You can probably see where this is going. Obviously, by using Siri to find local places, info about the weather, or to ask for any factual info, which is provided by Wolfram Alpha, people are not going to do all those things on Google.
So Google is definitely losing some searches in the mobile space, which is gearing up to be very important for anything on the web, but search in particular.
But, of course, it will also be gaining some searches as well, since, as anyone that has dabbled with any voice commands technology, there will be many times that Siri will fail.
It could be argued that, were it not for Siri, people would be directing their questions towards Google, so the search engine is not really gaining anything from Siri failures.
But that doesn't account for the fact that Siri is going to make people more comfortable with trying to discover things on their phone, since it's so easy and fun to use.
Without Siri, people would have simply not asked those questions, many times, since it meant having to go through the hassle of using Google Search, even if they used voice commands.
It's pretty hard to speculate on what effect, if any, Siri will have on mobile Google searches. But it's important to remember that Siri is just a layer built on top of existing search, discovery and answer technologies, be them Google Search, Yelp or Wolfram Alpha, so those are not going anywhere.