Where do personal assistants get their information?

Article Written by : Quadra Design

Personal assistants look to be the future of computer interaction. If the future is all about optimization for personal assistants, then it is important to know the sources of information. The first point to remember is that the source of information varies for each query and vertical. The other is that the sources vary from device to device.

In these examples, we will look at the sources Siri uses. When you ask Siri for something that is transactional, she will query the following sources:

OpenTable

CitySearch

Yelp

Yahoo! Local

ReserveTravel

In the above example, a restaurant reservation will query OpenTable while trip planning will mean it will query ReserveTravel. When it comes to buying tickets for an event, Siri will use:

Eventful

StubHub

LiveKick

Movie information comes from:

MovieTickets

Rotten Tomatoes

The important thing to remember here is that as a business if you want to be part of the answer, you need to be listed on one of the supported services. The first step is to find the source of information that assistants use for your vertical. Then, look at getting listed in each and every one of those sites. Often, the sources for the more popular categories will be the same across most of the devices.

Getting on the results list of a personal assistant like Google Home or Alexa should be part of the optimization strategy going forward.