[nu23]

I guess one reason people see siri as a threat to google is that if voice based interfaces take off, no matter who does it, there is less scope for advertisements - which are more annoying when spoken out loud. It's still too soon to say, of course, maybe voice apps will always be a smaller share or google could possibly find another business model.

[alexhawdon]

Whilst I do agree it changes things, this type of interface doesn't necessarily rule out advertising.

At the end of the day, someone needs to pay the bills. With Siri, you're arguably paying the bill when you give your money to Apple.

A future free 'Siri', from Google or elsewhere, might have to rely on advertising money. A lot of Siri's functionality is search - there's no reason why Siri couldn't serve up sponsored results when you make a search just as we're used to with more traditional search engines.

[nu23]

Yes, as long as one still needs to look at the screen there is still scope for ads. On-screen ads, if they are small enough, aren't annoying and sometimes they are useful too. There will be some interesting dynamics regarding how ad money is distributed among all the api backends.

But if voice response is used a lot, then ads(in the audio) will be sufficiently annoying for many people to switch to paying the equivalent small amount every month for ad-free services (which will have to be be distributed to the backend providers using micropayments). If this kind of service works out, then the mechanism exists for getting rid of the on-screen ads too, whether or not people actually use it. I wonder how much a the ad-value for a typical user is every month. A very rough calculation 30 billion in google's revenue/(say 200 million users * 12 months) gives 12.5 dollars/month. I think this should be an upper bound on the average, and that there will be a large variance - users who consume drugs will have larger value for advertisers, for instance.

[speek]

That's one of the things that we're exploring over at Zazu (voice-enabled hyper-contextual advertising) -- we've stumbled upon some really interesting things that happen when you combine voice, context, and advertising; one of which is that our users have 8x more interactions with advertisements than they would any other mobile advertising platform.

[lsb]

Do they enjoy having 8x more interactions with advertisements? Or it is inescapable?

[speek]

We'd hope so. We're not trying to advertise to you -- only tell you about something that we think you'd like.