"Hey Siri, are you worried about competitive threats from Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN's Alexa?"
While Apple Inc. AAPL's Siri could come up with a "witty" answer to this question, it may not be enough to convince customers to stay within the Apple ecosystem. According to Bloomberg, Apple may be struggling to keep pace with Amazon's Alexa device, which is becoming "one of the hottest" products within the emerging area of virtual personal assistants.
Bloomberg, citing "a person familiar with the plans," reported that Apple is looking to re-gain the upper hand in the virtual personal assistant space. The company is set to announce that it will allow for the first time outside developers to integrate its Siri technology with third party apps.
Doing so would at the very least bring an iPhone or iPad up to par with Amazon's Alexa device, which can already order a pizza or even an Uber car.
"Siri needs to grow up and get smarter, and by being in other apps it will get smarter because it will know more of what I do," Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies in San Jose, California, told Bloomberg. "It's like quicksand — if you move slightly, you sink deeper. It's another little thing that gets you more entrenched into the ecosystem."
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