

Apple's Strategy Tax on Services - johnjlocke
http://praxtime.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/apple-strat-tax-voice-as-god-particle/

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yourapostasy
Note that one of the original developers of the virtual assistant software
Wildfire went on to work on Android, and is now at Google. Remember that
Wildfire was available in the 1990s, about 20 years ago, and to the best of my
knowledge is still the best experience available in the in-call constant
presence virtual assistant use case (a company called Virtuosity still sells
it), though both Google and Apple blow it out of the water for more general
use cases.

I don't think mobile-device-based offline voice interaction is going to be
sufficiently fluid for the mass market for awhile yet, but Google certainly
has the server and network effects infrastructure to make advanced, mass
market voice recognition work and keep improving the experience, and use that
collected data to drive algorithmic and corpus improvements in the offline
module. If Apple styles itself as a leading consumer tech brand, then it will
be interesting to see how they counter Google.

And counter they must: at the moment, voice interaction is one-on-one, but
with enough algorithms and corpus, independent agency will become possible. It
will be very limited at first. Something along the lines of directing the
virtual assistant to call your vet's office for an appointment that works with
not just your timetable, but your anticipated errand locations traversal (that
is, solving a limited-case Traveling Salesman problem on the fly).

