If there is an area of ​​Apple that (almost) everyone agrees that needs urgent adjustments and improvements if the company wants to compete on an equal footing with its competitors, it is the one related to its digital assistant. THE Crab she is often described as one of the least skilled assistants in the world and receives criticism even from the creators of the technology that originated it.
But is Apple making the necessary efforts to turn that game around? Well, according to data collected by the Thinknum, at least at one point Apple is losing badly to one of its main competitors: the Amazon has hired many more people for the development team at Alexa than what Apple has done to expand Siri’s development team.
Analyzing only vacancies opened by each company the day before yesterday (2/1), Amazon had 747 job offers with the word “Alexa” in the title; Apple, for its part, had only 167 vacancies with the word «Siri». That is, the electronic retail giant is hiring professionals at a rate five times faster than Apple to develop its digital assistant.
Taking historical data into account in the past two and a half years, Amazon has consistently offered vacancies for Alexa at an average rate four times higher than Apple’s offers for Siri-related positions. The graph below shows this disparity well:
Himself Thinknum makes a point: Amazon is a company with a much larger staff than Apple (there are 613,000 versus 80,000 employees) and, therefore, its hiring rate is also much higher. However, analyzing only the sectors related to digital assistants, companies are more or less on an equal footing – the rate of new hires, therefore, remains a very noticeable difference.
Of course, just a large number of hires is not the key to the success of anything: Apple may well present a better product with a small team, as it has proven to be able to do several times since its founding. The point is that, so far, this has not happened with Siri; would it be the case, therefore, that Apple accelerated this attraction for new talents and put more people working on the assistant and generating ideas for her?
I would say yes.
via 9to5Mac
