A lot of people choose to buy the iPhone over everything else for a few reasons. First of all, you can use iTunes on the phone, which means instant access to all your favorite music, movies, and even TV shows anywhere you go. The other thing that really draws people into iPhone is Siri, one of the only virtual assistants out there that actually works fairly well. Google may have voice command, but it isn’t nearly as advanced as Siri, who can actually have conversations with you or answer questions by doing searches online for you. But is this new technology going to be the norm? And how will that affect your mobile marketing efforts?

Microsoft developing Cortana

Cortana will have all the basic functionality also found with Siri, but it will only be available for Microsoft phones. The name Cortana comes from the name of the artificial intelligence in the Halo games, which gets some XBox fans pretty excited. Still, it will be represented with a circle on the screen rather than a woman, according to the Independent. Of course, this is all just speculation based on a video that was “leaked” online about Cortana. The video shows how the function would work, but it may not be fully accurate. More details about Cortana are expected to be released in April offering official information rather than just wild guesses from excited customers.

Will this be the new norm?

As technology advances and smartphone manufacturers try to come up with better technology every year, they will have no choice but to improve the virtual assistants available through your smartphone. On top of that, customers will expect these improvements and anticipate the new options available to them through their smartphones. That means you can expect virtual assistants to be the norm on all smartphones in just a couple of years. Whether or not that technology will work well enough to react like a real person or not is still being debated, but you will have access to what seems to be a person on your phone helping you with your day-to-day tasks.

Marketing with virtual assistants

Mobile marketing may never be the same when you are using virtual assistants to help you market your company. Though the technology may not exist for these virtual assistants to advertise while offering their service, you may have the ability to do that shortly. Even if it doesn’t happen, having the ability to determine how to get the virtual assistant to pick your company over all the rest in searches may be the key. If someone asks their phone “what is the best plumber in my area?” to their assistant, the phone will need to search the web and figure it out. Your SEO, especially in regards to optimizing your mobile site, will make all the difference in getting more customers to your company. Of course, text marketing will be just as effective since the phone will just read the text to your customer, so you can feel good knowing not much is going to change there.

Source: Independent