Apple opens up Siri to app developers

Apple announced today that it will be opening up Siri to third-party developers through an API, giving outside apps the ability to activate from Siri's voice commands, and potentially endowing Siri with a wide range of new skills and datasets. The move follows similar announcements by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, all of which are betting that voice commands and chatbots will be one of the next big computing paradigms. When Steve Jobs introduced Siri to the world five years ago, it felt like a revelatory advancement. Sure, there had been digital assistants before, but not one you speak to naturally or carry around in your pocket. In the time since, however, this kind of conversational AI proliferated out to lots of devices, with big offerings from most of Apple's major competitors.