Google exec Schmidt claims Siri is ‘significant development’

In a written response to questions posed by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt made a brief statement about the Siri feature of the iPhone 4S. PC Magazine reports that in his response, Schmidt backtracked on a prior statement that Apple was not a competitive threat in search, and called Siri a “significant development.” He added that “Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information.” A recent non-scientific study of 40 Siri users found that the feature greatly reduced the users’ dependence on Google search, with 27 users reporting that they haven’t done a single Google search since they got the iPhone 4S and 13 reporting an average of two searches; these users would have previously averaged over 10 Google searches during the same period. [via MDN | MarketWatch]