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Aro Mobile starts to come out of hiding…
As first covered by the NYT, and then by Scoble (video below) and Techcrunch (screencast also below), Aro is indeed starting to show some skin.
I’ve gotten a few questions as to how Aro compares with Siri, and those are worth mentioning here. The two certainly do have in common a certain non-triviality above all else — they make real use of semantics and NLP and machine learning, at scale.
They’re also both the kind of apps that make us all realize that intelligence at the interface, as Tom Gruber calls it, is here.
But they’re two very different apps in almost every other respect.
Aro, besides being delivered, at least at first, on Android (Siri was only on the iPhone, though we did preview an Android version at SXSW), has a very different value prop. Whereas Siri was focused on transacting from and around and within an ecosystem of Web services, Aro is focused instead on the PIM — on email, calendar, address book, phone and browser.
Aro is also much more of what I would call a “prosthetic” than an assistant — Aro isn’t about task delegation on my behalf — instead it’s about augmentation — it’s about a more efficient me. It’s about a better way to Android (funny, he used Android as a verb…) and a more productive and effective phone experience.
And in that sense Aro is much more selfish too, it’s a selfish product — it’s inward-looking, it’s concerned with personal productivity inside my most frequently used apps, instead of being outwardly-facing, and leveraging the best of the Web in a single, conversational command line 2.0 — a “mashup so end all mashups” as Siri was often described.
I could, truth be told, see the two working hand in hand…
Disclosure: Siri was formerly a client, before its acquisition by Apple, and Aro Mobile is a client.
