Siri: Is it a Threat to Search Engines?

The tech and social media world was abuzz with the release of Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) for Apple iOS devices last year. Siri is the app for Apple devices such as iPhones, which allows users to ask a question into the speaker of the device and Siri will interpret and answer the question.

This app has proven to be quite a useful one in the short time since its initial release in August, 2011. Apple and Siri inc. have programmed an unprecedented amount of information into this app and thus molded a personal electronic assistant that borders on super intelligent. This allows a nearly limitless range of questions to be correctly answered on the spot. If there is to be a spawning of an intelligent race of sentient machines as portrayed in Terminator or The Matrix, Siri just may well be its precursor.

Though this has become a reliable means of searching for answers, this growing app may pose a future threat to some of the largest social media search engines out there, such as Google and Bing. The ease and accessibility of merely asking a question into your phone and getting a reliable answer can arguably bode ill for the common search engines if Siri becomes more widespread.

Like Google and other search engines, Siri has the ability to adapt and be programmed with even more answers to questions. It will record questions asked and add them to its database so that it grows and becomes an even larger repository for information, questions and answers.

What may stall the rise of Siri and competition against Google and other search engines may be that Siri has only become available on the newest versions of iPhones and iOS devices. Since the app hasn’t been implemented into the older generations, it may not yet threaten the largest search engine databases.

Only time will tell if Siri will come to rival the largest search engines in years to come.