Apple's WWDC: What You Likely Missed

Each year at the World Wide Developer's Conference, Apple unveils it's latest software and hardware developments to the world.  This year was no exception and Apple announced several exciting new products including:

• iRadio: an online music streaming application designed to compete with the likes of Pandora and Spotify
• iOS 7 - It's latest mobile software for iPhone and iPad designed by Apple's famed hardware designed Jony Ive

But without much fanfare Apple released another important change that will be part of iOS 7: a major update to the search engine powering Siri.  Apple has pushed out Google as the default search engine and replaced it with Microsoft's Bing.  Now, if you're like me, this may not seem like a big deal.  After all, Siri was fun to play with when it was first released but the novelty has worn off and for my daily searches, I still prefer to go to a search engine like Google to find my answers.  Siri is just too cumbersome and inaccurate and doesn't return the same caliber of results that a typical search engine does.

But with the release of iOS 7, Apple promises significant improvements to Siri.  Not only will Siri speak to you in a much more realistic male or female voice, allow you to play your last voicemail and access other phone commands, but it will also enable you to search Twitter, Wikipedia and the internet.  Web searches that were previously held up by Siri's "Would you like me to search the web" question will skip this step and automatically jump to the search results.  Instead of being powered by Safari's current default browser, Google, they will be powered by Bing and displayed within Siri's own interface.  You'll likely still be able to use Google but you'll have to specifically indicate Google in your voice command.

Are the improvements to Siri, really going to make enough of a difference to bring Google down from it's current dominance in search?  Probably not. But with Siri becoming a more efficient tool to search the web, it is certainly worth watching.