Apple iPhone 6s is great, but Siri experience remains incomplete in India

No cards

As an iOS user, who is often on Android devices as well, the Google Now app has become a necessity. For starters, the cards in Google Now are something I find really useful. My list of pending bills, when a movie I have booked is about to start playing, delivery of umpteen packages, flight tickets, alerts on when to leave, etc; the cards holds it all. It’s a useful synopsis of my daily notifications and given the number of emails that keep coming in these days, this ensures that I don’t miss the important stuff.

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With Siri, while I can open emails, and now even find emails from a particular contact, there is no stack of information neatly waiting for you. Of course with Proactive assistance, the spotlight bar will now search across apps. So if you are looking for something on your phone, you will find it eventually.

Missing directions

Siri is still unable to give directions in India (it does in other countries like UK, US), which in my opinion is a serious flaw. Many a times, while on a drive, I need to open the navigation and I know that in a Google phone I could just ask for the same on Google Now, without having to tap on the Maps application. Google Now would do that for me automatically.

If I could the same natively on iOS via Siri in India, it would be a much more seamless experience and definitely bring up my daily usage of Siri. But sadly this not a possibility here yet. Nor can Siri tell me what movies are playing in India. At one point it offered helpfully to play some movie trailers, but then it didn’t end up playing anything.

Watch video review of the Apple iPhone 6s Plus

Within the OS

But that doesn’t mean it’s all boring with Siri. One particularly useful feature, I would say is the Photo Search. If you take a lot of photos on your Apple device, Siri might be the easiest way to navigate.

Siri will search for music and opens photos at a particular month, if you prefer.

Apple now lets users speak in natural language to say sentences like ‘Photos taken in June’ and Siri will open the app at the exact spot. Since I have a fair share of photos on this device, this is particularly useful, especially when trying to go back and forth between various vacation photos. But then again, this is not something I do everyday.

The other bit is that all event invites, upcoming travels which land in my email get automatically added to the calendar. And yes I can get Siri to play music when I’m feeling lazy or can’t touch the screen for any particular reason.

Google Now in Android M will search across apps, offer contextual information.

However, with Google Now in Android M, the search giant has realigned the way your mobile search will work. Google Now in Android M will search across apps, offer contextual information around a movie, a restaurant that someone might mention in an email. For example, Google will prompt you about making dinner reservations at a place, if say a friends mails or messages you about a particular restaurant. And it will work across apps. Natively, Siri still doesn’t prompt a user about such information or alerts.

Overall with Siri, you still have to be a fair bit involved, prompting and prodding the Apple voice-assistant for information. With Google Now, it’s an entirely different universe, since the service will manage pretty much manage your life.

Now, if you value privacy and your digital rights, all this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Although you can turn of Web History search settings in Google Now, Google is still preparing those cards based on your emails, and your habits. This is the trade-off for convenience that many users have simply accepted.

To conclude, Google Now still has a massive edge off Siri and iOS. And this edge matters, because in smartphones, specs battle is now a dead issue. The debate on phones had shifted towards what these two can offer in terms of user experience, and until Siri starts giving me alerts about when my Amazon package is arriving, the Google search app is going nowhere from my iPhone.