Since all the big players from the tech industry have their own version of a virtual personal assistant, one of them must come out as the best. When comparing itself to Cortana, though, Siri is only bragging about it getting bigger.
Does size matter? It seems to do for Apple, who’s been manufacturing lilliputian iPhones, while everyone else (well, not really, but at least its competitors) was well beyond the 5-inch mark. Keep your decency, people, I’m talking about display diagonals here! That being said, Microsoft (no longer Nokia, as Redmond dropped that brand) Lumia 830’s Cortana takes the spotlight in the tech giant’s latest ad, and confronts iPhone 6’s Siri about the things it can and cannot do. The answer? Everything seems to be about getting bigger, at least in Apple’s case.
During an International Marketing Strategies course I attended earlier this year, the professor pointed out that in the US it’s OK to refer to your competitors in your ads, something that’s not really permitted on this side of the pond. His example included Audi and BMW, who have been making fun of each other in American TV commercials and billboards. The same thing happened in the tech world, too, as Samsung has been pointing and laughing at Apple for a few years now.
To top it all, Microsoft’s latest ad is holiday-themed, as Cortana reminds Siri that getting bigger this time of the year happens even to the best of us. Other than that, the whole ad is a long series of “but can you do that?”, in an attempt to emphasize only some of Siri’s downsides.
Mind you, the exchange portrayed by Microsoft sound realistic, but none of the VPAs is programmed to say that in real life. What Redmond is trying to show is that it doesn’t matter who has been around the longer. It’s functionality people are paying for, and this is exactly what they should get.
Still, when buying a smartphone or tablet, the included VPA is rarely the decisive factor. You should pay more attention to the operating system the device is running, and whether its app ecosystem is good enough for you. It wouldn’t be nice to buy an expensive mobile device just to find out that the app you’re looking for doesn’t have an equivalent on that specific device, now would it?
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