I’m going to start saying it: I’m one of those who is not completely counting on Siri in the smart speakers race. After all, despite being one of the first in the market and having the mobile advantage (as I like to call it),  it doesn’t seem to catch up to the times, or have any interest to do so really. The recent Apple events have not release me from that thinking until the Salesforce partnership was announced. Is Siri an enterprise product?

ComputerWorld published an article yesterday that had a different view from other tech writers blasting on the assistant. The premise: Siri is already and enterprise product and here’s why, and goes on to explain in detail. I’ll spare you of those in this episode, the too long didn’t read line is about privacy and how Siri handles the requests. 

You may be the product, but enterprise users are not.

Implying that even if users are willing to give up privacy for other services, enterprise users are not.

This is what CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff ask to Siri in the demo of the integration during Dreamforce:

Hey Siri, update the opportunity information and reduce the customer success warning from Red to Green. Remind me in 2 weeks to follow up that all of our actions have now been completed. Send an email to the customer and thank them for buying lunch. And Play U2 ‘Beautiful Day’.

I’m all about the argument for privacy and clearly Apple is pushing hard on it. In the recent International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Brussels, Cook took a very strong strategic position over privacy. Blasting other big companies over recent scandals and management of user’s data. If this is going to be the only argument for Siri as an enterprise product, then let’s keep going with it. (Let’s clarify that I do agree to some extent to the premise of the article, to the extent that I don’t is the following).

Google and Facebook are the [big] companies recently involved in user’s data scandals and probably the ones you could argue collect the most data from users for their core business. However, individual users trust Google every day with countless of services and more data, companies do the same (Gmail 1.5 billion users?, Google Cloud, etc).

Amazon on the other hand, is the first cloud services provider and enterprises already trust their most important assets to AWS Services. The API model is here to stay, probably an overdue statement at this point, but follow me here, and the fact that to build for Siri you have to explicitly partner with Apple, as opposed to build and launch an Action or Skill might be a problem to consider too. Note that I didn’t mentioned how Siri perform compared to other smart assistants which can open another line of thoughts.

Is Siri an enterprise product? It seems so per Salesforce integration. But I think there is a bigger question here and it’s will privacy matter so much to influence that much in the market of smart assistants?

Love when questions lead to more questions.

My name is Mari, This is VoiceFirst Weekly flash briefing. You can find me on Twitter as voicefirstlabs or in Instagram as voicefirstweekly. Have a nice Friday and I’ll talk to you tomorrow!