The iPhone 4S’ Siri voice-activated personal assistant is an exciting feature, and arguably the reason the device is selling so well. And Apple isn’t done with the service, either. New job postings for Apple suggest more features are on their way for the much-lauded service.
According to a story from 9to5Mac, Siri user interface manager Dan Keen has posted a pair of job listings for iOS engineers on his Twitter feed, both of which suggest new features for Siri. The service is still in beta, which means it isn’t completed, but when it is, Siri will be able to do more and interact with other apps, as well as support additional languages and include improvements to its interface.
Both job postings mention working on Siri’s API, or application programming interface, which is the protocol through which Siri would interact with other services and, potentially, other apps. As 9to5Mac points out, the postings don’t necessarily mean that Apple intends to open Siri to third parties, it could just be APIs that interact with the external data sources Siri already uses, such as Yelp.
But it seems as though it’s only a matter of time until Apple makes Siri available to some other apps through its APIs. That would make it available to use with lots of other services; 9to5Mac points out the possibility of being able to update your Facebook status or play track on Spotify through Siri. Opening up those APIs to other apps would give Siri a lot more capabilities, potentially. We can probably expect Apple to wait until Siri isn’t in beta anymore to allow that to happen, but eventually, it would seem that opening up Siri to the public would make for endless possibilities.
It seems like Apple would be remiss in not making Siri available to other apps. Hackers are already jailbreaking Siri to use it on older iPhones, and to control other things, like a car.
Siri is a big boon for Apple right now, and the company obviously is only in the beginning phases of making the service work for iPhone owners. It’ll be exciting to see what more Siri can do as Apple continues to improve it.
