Apple and Google Maps: Big Data War

Back in late 2012, Apple made a bold move by dropping Google Maps and attempting to offer their own. Introduced in iOS 6, Maps was an attempt to weaken their competitor, Google. It came to be, reportedly, because Google wouldn’t license their turn-by-turn navigation service.

“The battleground can be described in just two words: Big Data. Google has it; Apple is scrambling to catch up.”

Aside from dropping the mature, seven year older brother, Google Maps, Apple is also lagging behind two major proponents crucial to their market.

Speech Recognition and Google’s Cloud Advantage.

(Note: at the time of this article Google Now had not been released.)

Though Apple’s Siri is able to respond back to users with its own voice, Android’s Voice Search has proven to be incredibly more accurate at recognizing and answering users voice and commands.

Once 3G networks rolled out, Google changed the game when it started using massive databases to store everything users said during voice-searches on Android devices. The higher network speeds allowed Google to shift the speech recognition into a data-drive, cloud service that trained itself. The system would compare speech patterns of millions of users with a focus on the content and context of the queries themselves.

“We designed a system that would improve over time and learn from the queries. The increase in accuracy of our system is only matched by the increase in usage traffic,” says Bertrand Damiba, Google product manager.

 Apple has started to follow suit, but the question is if their efforts can catch up to the mature, ever-growing ones of Google.

Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2012/10/03/google-apple-maps-big-data-cloud/