Concept: Siri and iBooks integration

Posted by uncleho on November 28, 2012 10:39 pm 21

Hello everyone. So I was really pleased with movie integration with Siri in iOS 6. However, I am also a great lover of books, and I would love to be able to ask Siri some questions about books and get answers. While this is still a work in progress (and I am not entirely pleased with some of the highlighting of the text in the images), you can get the idea of what I want. With Siri movie integration, you can ask what movie won a certain award in a certain year. With books, it would be very similar. For example, say I want to know who won the Newbery Medal (this would work, of course, with other book medals such as the Caldecott Medal and the National Book Award) in 2011, Siri would show this:

As you can see, Siri would helpfully show the publisher, book title, author's name, category of the book, the date of publishing, and the current number of stars in iBooks/iTunes (this is the best solution I can think of since there is no big aggregate of book reviews like Rotten Tomatoes and Apple already has plenty of book review data). Tapping on the stars would show you a review page like the one found in the movies section (with the top recommended reviews featured).

If you look further down the screenshot, you can see the number of pages in the book, and part of the summary. Again, it pulls this data directly from iBooks. This would be super easy for Apple since they already have the data. If you scroll down, you see this:

The summary is completed and there is a link to purchase the book in iTunes/iBooks. This would open the iBooks app and let the user purchase or download a sample. Pretty simple. This works just like movie integration and would make Siri a whole lot better, at least for me. As I said, it is not anywhere near perfect, but it is pretty clear to get an idea of what kind of integration would be nice.

Thank you for reading, I hope you like what you see. Feel free to leave a comment below and/or tweet me at @ihkdesign. And I will continue to update this post with any more additions I come up with.