With Apple's World Wide Developer Conference coming up Monday, I've been hearing a lot about how Apple is behind the game on artificial intelligence. Between the Viv demo, and the success of the Amazon Echo, its easy to see why people are starting to count out Siri. It doesn't help that Apple's stock price is down too, and that negative halo effect is causing perception problems with all of Apple's business lines.
To understand who might win this space and why, you have to understand that these personal digital assistants operate on three different levels of core technology: voice, intent, and implementation. Solving the voice level is a signal processing problem. Success at this level means understanding various dialects and conflicting words (did you say "socks" or "sacks"?). Amazon Echo, from what I've read, is currently the best at this level, surpassing even humans.
The next level is taking the sounds the device heard and converting them to an intent. If a device hears "show me my pics", am I asking about pictures, or did I mean "show me my picks" because I was talking about my fantasy sports draft? Taking language and understanding the intent is perhaps the most difficult level, because of the ambiguity in human language. I don't know for a fact that Google is the best at this but, they should be. Google probably has the best data set in the world for mapping natural language to intent, so they should win this level.
The final level is task/knowledge oriented. Once an assistant understands my intent, can it answer the question or execute the task? This is really a function of how many things the assistant can do, and with Apple opening Siri to developers, I expect Apple will win this level. What I mean is, Apple has the most robust developer ecosystem for developing end-user functionality on their platform, so my guess is that, a year from now, Siri does the most stuff.
The question then becomes, which level is most important to win? I'd argue that the top two levels, the ones currently won by Google and Amazon, are the most likely to be commoditized. If I'm right, and Apple wins at the level that is most important - the number of things an assistant can do - then Apple is fine going forward, despite what some people are saying.