PayPal and Siri have partnered up. Image: Ollinka/Shutterstock
Online payments company PayPal has partnered up with Apple’s iOS virtual assistance Siri, integrating the service in 31 countries, across ten languages.
PayPal has been tweaking its immensely popular payments services quite a bit this year. In May, it removed its full suite of protection for users spending their money on crowdfunding campaigns, due to “risks” for both parties in that realm.
It has also recently expanded its partnership with MasterCard, leading to a significant jump in its stock around September.
The company’s November shift promises to be bigger still, with news that it has now integrated Siri’s assistance service on iOS.
Users can send and request money via PayPal, through Siri, orchestrated by voice command. On iOS 10, with the latest PayPal and Siri updates, simply say: “Hey Siri, send Conor €50 using PayPal.”
Done.
Sending and receiving money from friends and family has long been one of the most popular activities on PayPal. In fact, last year PayPal completed $41bn in peer-to-peer (P2P) volume across its own site, Venmo and Xoom.
And, with Christmas around the corner, PayPal predicts more than 17m P2P transactions in the month of December alone.
PayPal is providing this integration for its consumers in a variety of languages across 31 countries, including: Australia, Austria, Belgium (French and Dutch), Brazil, Canada (English and French), China, Denmark, Finland (Finnish), France, Germany, Hong Kong (Cantonese), India, Ireland, Israel (Hebrew), Italy, Japan, Malaysia (Malay), Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Saudi Arabia (Arabic), Singapore (English), Spain, Sweden, Switzerland (French, German, and Italian), Thailand, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates (Arabic) and United States.
Samsung is working on its own competition to both Siri and iMessage, the latter being the home of services such as PayPal’s, once the pursuit of conversational commerce finally reaches its end point.
In recent months, Samsung has acquired messaging company NewNet and AI platform Viv, the latter from the creators of Siri.
The company is betting big on Viv, incorporating it in some way into its next flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8.
Scheduled to launch next year, Samsung has said that this new AI will be “significantly differentiated” from its rivals, particularly Siri and Google’s latest product, Google Assistant, first released on its latest Pixel phone.
PayPal on a Viv-themed Samsung phone could soon follow.
