Proactive versus On-Tap and the future of AI Assistants

In the past couple of weeks, both Google and Apple have given us their respective visions of what a personal assistant should be on our mobile devices and the differences are a sharp lesson in the fundamental differences in the company’s philosophies.

Google Now On Tap will “tap” into the apps and other services on your phone to deliver you contextual information.  

Apple’s newest enhancements to Siri are… basically the same.

In fact, both companies did the same thing in a demo at their respective developers conferences.  Google showed a request for “what is his real name?” (in reference to the artist Skillerx who was playing on the phone) and Apple asked Siri to “remind me about this later” in reference to a web page opened on Safari.

In practice, it’s the same trick.  Having the phone tackle improper pronouns based on current context.

In execution, they couldn’t be more different.

Google is solving the problem by building an OS layer that will scan and use everything on your phone.

Apple is making an API available to developers who want to plug in.

And that is a distinction that speaks to the heart of each company’s philosophies on privacy and user data.

Google has no qualms about writing a scripting layer that will see everything on your phone.  Yes, you can opt out all together; but for Google it’s all or nothing.  Give us everything or get none of our services.

Apple is letting developers (and by extension, savvy users) make the choice.  Don’t want your finances to show up?  Pick an app that doesn’t use the API.  In theory, developers could even make the API link opt-in on a per-app basis inside their own settings.

Bottom line, Apple is saying “opt-in” by default where Google is saying “opt-out."

So what does it mean for users?

Well, first, expect that Google’s offering will have higher adoption by default (of course, there’s still that little OS upgrade hurdle to overcome) whereas Apple’s developers may be slow to adopt the API and include their apps.  But over time, I think Apple’s offering will be more compelling as the app developers figure out the best way to use this API and what information their users want included (another key difference- Google is doing it’s own aggregation; Apple is letting developers lead.)

In the end, both platforms are going to get better and continue to push each other forward.  And clearly, more intelligent personal assistants are the path.  But if you (like me) care about how we get there, pick your platform carefully.