Siri and the Apple TV

If you haven’t watched the Apple Keynote, you’ll want to open it up and jump to about 25 minutes before the end. This is the point where Apple introduces Siri. As a feature for the iPhone 4S, it’s a great addition, but I think its true potential lies not with the iPhone, but with the Apple TV. I truly believe it could be Apple’s next great reinvention.

On the iPhone, Siri is great, but I don’t think it represents a huge leap. It should be on par with FaceTime: very smooth, very nice, and quite useful in several edge cases, but in the end they’ll only occasionally be the preferred tool for the job. The existing finger-touch input paradigm works wonderfully on the iPhone, and it’ll be hard to get people to use it until it becomes a more powerful tool than touch.

Siri’s time to shine will be when the new Apple TV comes out. TV’s are notorious for having terrible choices for input methods. Remote controls and game console controllers do the job, but are inadequate for complex input. Keyboards are a pain to use on a couch, to say nothing of mice. Motion gestures (like Kinect and the Wii) aren’t necessarily natural and have to be learned. Voice, however, gets complex points across naturally and comfortably.

Having Siri embedded into an Apple TV will make it a must-have device. “Play Quantum of Solace.” With less than a second, Siri can dig through the media library and grab your movie to play. You might be able to do achieve that on a Mac keyboard using Quicksilver or Alfred, but Siri doesn’t need an awkward keyboard to accomplish anything. Complex media retrieval & management tasks made fast and friendly. That’s what TV has needed for years.

It’s not just pulling up movies and music that Siri would do - it could do anything other than phone calls that the iPhone 4S can do. After all, the Apple TV is an iOS device. Nobody would use their TV for adding reminders and looking up directions on a normal TV because they can’t get their commands into it comfortably. The new Apple TV would open up a new world of possibilities and allow people to redefine what a TV is used for.

All of the pieces are there for this to happen, except for one: how Siri would be called to interpret a command. I think the name Siri was probably chosen because it didn’t sound like any common name, thus opening up the possibility that an always-on Siri device could be commanded simply by saying its name. (Yes, yes, just like the Starship Enterprise’s main computer.) That would score Apple a lot of points just based on sheer coolness, but a one-button remote works almost as well, saves a lot of processing power and saves Apple a lot of headaches.

Just based on this alone, Apple could release a voice-commanded Apple TV to achieve huge success, and if Apple is doing this then we must at least expect that. However, it’s also possible at alongside it could come an actual display with an embedded Apple TV, because Apple can’t achieve the true experience they desire without getting rid of the complicated display and all its annoying input and adjustment settings. That said, that would turn a $100 device into a $1000 device, so there will definitely be a standalone box.

Of course, I haven’t heard anything to back up any of this, or even read anything speculating on it. It just seems so obvious to me, however, that Apple had to at least thought about the possibility of doing this. All of the pieces are there to make it happen, now, except for the TV UI. That’s the easy part, though. I wouldn’t bet that the Apple TV team has been working on this before a few days ago (gotta love Apple’s intra-departmental secrecy), but I would bet that they’re working on it now. Next year is going to be very interesting.

Oh, and one more thing. Android phones have Siri-like voice commands, and have had them for some time. The Google TV didn’t even consider that and threw a keyboard at their potential customers. Google is going to be really embarrassed that Apple beat them to the punch again when they had all the pieces too. However, you can also bet that they are where Apple’s competition is going to come from.