Sunday, October 30, 2011

Siri in Capital Markets

My wife has been having all sorts of fun with her new iPhone 4s, constantly testing the NLP capabilities of the Siri servers. If you ask Siri "What is 2 plus 2", she (yes, Siri is my new daughter!) won't speak the answer, but she will show you the appropriate page in Wolfram Alpha.

I don't know if Siri will ever be used for trading. With any mobile platform, the main worries are connectivity and security. There have been reports about security gaps within the 4s, especially where Siri is concerned.

But, the Siri platform, combined with Wolfram Alpha, can be the starting point for powerful, on-the-fly analytics. Combine this with an alerting platform, and you can begin to see the possibilities for Capital Markets.

Apple needs to open up the Siri platform for integration with 3rd party apps. I can imagine someone entering a simple command like "Siri, tell me when IBM trades past its 52-week high" or something more complex like "Siri, tell me when people are rotating into the Utilities sector". This kind of custom semantic processing has been around for a while, but it's crucial that Apple opens up an API for Siri that is available to iOS developers.

Another thought - If Siri integration will only be available through a Cocoa API, does that mean that people will move away from developing HTML5 apps for the iPhone? Or will technologies like PhoneGap be more popular?



©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

No comments: