Hey, Siri, how will Apple keep up with its rivals?

SAN FRANCISCO — Asking Apple’s voice-activated assistant, Siri, what the company plans to unveil at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco this week elicits the response: “If I told you, they’d probably make me sit through product security again.”

Witty, perhaps, but Siri will have to supply more satisfying answers if it is going to convince customers, developers and investors that Apple is keeping pace with Alphabet’s Google Now and Amazon’s Alexa in one of the hottest emerging areas of tech: Virtual personal assistants.

Alongside updates to Apple Music and the company’s mobile, watch and television operating systems, Apple will announce that, for the first time, it will let outside developers integrate Siri with their apps, according to a person familiar with the plans. Getting programmers on board is an essential step towards building tools that make Apple’s devices more indispensable — such as apps that let you use voice commands to order a pizza or summon an Uber car, both of which Alexa can already do through the Echo in-home speaker.

“Siri needs to grow up and get smarter, and by being in other apps it will get smarter because it will know more of what I do,” said analyst Carolina Milanesi at Creative Strategies in San Jose, California. “It’s like quicksand — if you move slightly, you sink deeper. It’s another little thing that gets you more entrenched into the ecosystem.”

App Ecosystem

Indeed, Apple is trying to pull people deeper into its network of apps and services — from iTunes to Apple Music and iCloud storage — to help make up for slowing iPhone sales. The developers conference, which focuses on software, has therefore become more significant for Apple after playing second fiddle to the company’s much-heralded hardware rollouts for years. CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly highlighted the importance of sales from services, which have become the fastest-growing part of Apple’s business.

As part of that drive, Apple earlier this week laid out changes to the App Store. Starting today — when the conference kicks off in San Francisco — Apple will halve the portion of sales it takes from developers if customers subscribe to a product for more than a year, and it will let developers pay to get more prominent placement within United States App Store searches. A revamped music-streaming service will also be featured at WWDC, Bloomberg News reported in May. BLOOMBERG