For the most part, many of us equate Siri as being an Apple feature, but that wasn’t always the case. Siri used to belong to a small startup company that apparently not just Apple had their eye on, but US carrier Verizon. In a feature article by The Huffington Post, it was revealed that if it hadn’t been for Apple buying out Siri, it seems that Verizon would have installed Siri on all of their Droid lineup of phones, which as we’re sure most of you guys are aware of, are Android-based smartphones. It’s rather ironic considering that Siri is an iOS feature when it almost was an Android one, at least as far as Verizon was concerned.
According to the feature article, Verizon had signed a contract with the developers of Siri to install it on every one of their Droid smartphones. In fact the carrier even went to great lengths and began to shoot commercials to advertise that feature, although safe to say they were never aired, but boy are we curious as to how that might have turned out! Needless to say Apple’s buyout of the company destroyed whatever chance Verizon had to install Siri on its Droid lineup, although in a way with Verizon offering the iPhone on its network, they do have Siri to a certain degree.
While Siri was initially demonstrated to be a pretty powerful voice assistant feature that could help the iOS user perform a variety of day-to-day tasks, there were many hiccups that Apple ran into with Siri that resulted in many people writing the feature off. Apple has since classified Siri as being in “beta”, although we have to wonder had it been launched on Verizon’s Droid series of Android smartphones, would it have fared better or would Verizon have run into the same problems as Apple? What do you guys think?