With the exception of the light bulb query, these work just fine with iOS too – the thrust of his post is that these actions should be available without having to specifically request a voice interaction mode to be turned on, which Android requires as well.

I certainly take your point; that would be awesome. And thanks for the iOS information!

It was more confused by the original article though; he seemed to be suggesting that you would click on a particular UI component first: Want to open an webpage? Go to the home screen, then say "Web Browser", then click on the browser bar, then say 'The Economist'.

But why touch on small areas of the screen at all, if Siri is just a button-hold away and takes you right there? I think the take-home message is that many of those UI components could go away - we don't need a browser bar, we don't need a home screen, if we choose to use voice instead.

The whole point of the article is that the button hold is bad because Siri has no context to understand what you are about to say, isn't very intelligent, and that means you end up making up weird phrasings to try and indicate that you want the website "the Economist" to load in a browser, rather than directions to The Economist office building, or facts about The Economist website traffic from wolfram Alpha, or to open The Economist latest issue in iBooks ...

By being in a browser and selecting the URL bar, the context is narrowed from "anything you can say in English" to "a website, if it's not a website, search for it".

By dropping a dropdown, the context is "one item from this list".

N.b. he also talks about desktops, not just mobile.