Apple at WWDC Enables Developer Innovation: Siri Upgrades Lead the Way

As usual, Apple’s WWDC started with a bang – but on the 18th of April. As the tickets were released, developers and interested scrambled to get themselves a ticket via Apple’s new lottery system. For those lucky enough to receive a ticket, they were able to witness what the wait was all about: software, software and more software. Today a slew of new software products were released and/or announced targeting everything from Apple TV to Apple Watch as well as their flagship products such as iPhones, iPads and Macs. We learnt about the new Home App as part of iOS 10, a strong focus on privacy and one update announced which could completely change the way we interact with apps. What types of new disruptive innovations will this update allow? Let’s have a look.

The Siri Upgrade:Enabling Developer Innovation

In this article we will focus on one of the major updates presented today: Siri, Apple’s personal assistant. Probably the biggest news, from a developer perspective, is that the artificial intelligence assistant will now be open to third party developers in addition to making it available on the Macintosh too. Although behind Microsoft, which has already given developers access to its personal assistant Cortana, it should place Apple ahead of Google, which announced at SXSW this year that it will be opening up Google Now to developers. So what types of new innovations can we expect from this development?

Clearly the two obvious main groups which will benefit from this are app builders and consumers. On the consumer side, it’s always difficult to guess what innovative things people will do with the new Siri enabled apps, but we can already start to guess what low hanging fruit app developers will try to pick the fruit of Apple’s Siri labor.

Imagine you are an app developer (if you already are, then you can leave your developer hat on and just gaze out the window) and you want to simplify your app experience to allow the user to interact naturally with the software. A core part of that often means providing the user with a simple way to fulfill whatever needs they want to fulfill and what simpler way to do that than allowing the user to simply shout commands at your app? In the past, you probably had to license expensive third party speech recognition and Natural Language Processing libraries and hoped that these costs weren’t wasted. Now that has changed. The developer is no longer limited to just mouse finger or keyboard clicks. They can talk to their device which is the ultimate form of computer input at least until the device can read our minds.

Siri for Developers: Lowering the Barrier to Innovation in Computer Interaction

For all Apple developers, it will soon become possible to tap into Siri’s powerful language abilities. This will be a huge innovation enabler because (if Apple allows developers access for free), it will allow companies to avoid risky and upfront costs associated with third party software and simply allow people to give the technology a go. It means you can now test an idea in your target market without exposing yourself with a large financial burden. As I show in my soon to be released Innovation Tools book, this can be a game changer. Reducing the risk involved with any form of innovation can suddenly mean that this form of innovation becomes attractive for a larger section of society. This is important, because at the end of the day, it is people who innovate and if we lower the barrier to innovate then more people will enter the innovation game. With the result that our customers get easier to use and better personal experiences which are the underpinning of insanely great products.

But the revelation is bigger than this. Instead of simply having your app, tap into Siri’s extraordinary intelligence inside your app, it seems it should be possible to access your app simply by calling Siri from your iPhone. It may soon be possible to ask Siri things like “Order me an Uber to arrive in 10 minutes” or, when your hands are occupied or dirty, “Open the recipe app and find me a gluten-free recipe for spaghetti carbonara” and maybe halfway through the preparation “Scroll down to the second step in the method”. So now users don’t even need to have your app open to exploit its benefits.

The innovation implications of this seemingly understated announcement could be huge. But many of the announcements on WWDC day were understated and perhaps decisively so. Many of the announcements enable even more developer innovation and who knows what they will do with it. It is sort of like when Warner Von Braun the father of the Saturn rocket was asked, “Of what use is a baby?” and responded. “You won’t know until it grows up”.

Apple’s Siri: A revolution in User Interaction

These announcements could catalyze developers to test all sorts of applications, many of which may completely change the way you interact with your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac. It’s a revolution in the user experience. From an innovation perspective, the original App Store has been just another way to buy programs, so at best an incremental innovation. However, its implications were huge. It helped solve the problem for developers of getting their product to market.

Opening up Siri may seem similar but perhaps even bigger. It might be even bigger than what the graphical user interface, the mouse and touch screens did in yesteryear. A small step along the innovation curve, but the journey along that curve might be an exciting one yet. Plus truly revolutionary.

By Evan Shellshear and David Fradin