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Vs
The personal assistant heavyweights face off, as Apple's Siri takes on Google Assistant
Michael Grothaus
13:19, 25 Oct 2016
The personal assistants on iPhones and some Android phones received major upgrades this autumn. The iPhone’s iOS 10 personal assistant is Siri. With the latest release of the software Siri has greatly expanded its machine learning capabilities, thanks to backend changes. It’s also opened itself up to third party apps, allowing them to integrate their services in Siri’s answers to queries.
On the Android side of things, the new Google Pixel phone is the first Android device to use the company’s new Google Assistant software. Google is aiming for Assistant to be the successor to Google Now, which it’s built from and users should expect to see Assistant on more Android phones in the future. Features of Assistant are similar to Siri: you can issue voice commands to perform basic tasks on your phone (calling someone, taking down a note or reminder, etc), you can also ask it queries–including contextual queries, where each further question builds on top of the last one. For example, “Who is Chicago’s NBA team?” [A: The Bulls] “When did they last win the championship?” [A: 1998]. It’s this contextual linking of queries that is really going to decide which personal digital assistant is best.
Though Google Assistant has only been out for a short time YouTube user Marques Brownlee has put together an excellent head to head video of both Siri in iOS 10 running on an iPhone 7 Plus and Google Assistant running on a Pixel XL phone. Each phone sat side by side and Brownlee activated each assistant at the same time so they could both her each query in exactly the same way. It was the ultimate Siri VS Google Assistant showdown and here were the results:
Google Assistant VS Siri: Weather
When asked “what’s the weather” both devices hit this answer pretty quickly, but in different ways. Siri showed a chart of the weather forecast while Google Assistant read out the current temp and highs and low for the day.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Calculations
When given an equation, both assistants came back with the correct answer at the same time.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Opening Apps
Both assistants also opened the Instagram app when asked and at the same speed of each other.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Setting Timers and Alarms
Both assistants also easily set timers and alarms when asked and at the same speed of each other.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Geolocations and Reminders
Both assistants also easily set reminders with location information given as the speakers “home” when asked and at the same speed of each other. Each assistant knew where “home” was.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Business Information
Both assistants also returned the correct results when asking what time the post office was open until.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Stock Information
When asked what the current stock price of Tesla is, both assistants returned correct results, but Siri provided a handy financial chart with its answer while Google Assistant just read out the stock price.
Google Assistant VS Siri: General Questions
When asked “who is the president of the United States, Google Assistant returned Barack Obama, while Siri resulted to a Bing web search. But when asked a simpler question “what is mitochondria” both Siri and Google Assistant returned the definition. Same with questions about capital cities.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Contextual Questions
When the speaker went on to ask “How tall is he?” after his query about who the president was, Google Assistant came back with President Obama’s correct height, while Siri, bafflingly, returned a web result for “How tall is the United States?” However, in other conversational queries–such as ones about Kathmandu and its local time and population Siri, as well as Google Assistant, was able to follow the conversation and provide the correct answers.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Song Recognition
When asked what song was playing, Siri got the right answer while Google Assistant didn’t know.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Picture Search
Both Google Assistant and Siri displayed pictures of cats when asked, but Siri returned Bing Images results while Google returned personal photographs the speaker had taken of his cat. Both assistants were able to show photos the speaker too yesterday, when asked.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Personality
When asked to tell jokes, Google Assistant was the more jokey one, while Siri decided to keep things more serious.
Google Assistant VS Siri: Verdict
In the end Brownlee concluded that Google Assistant is more audio-based and conversational, reading out answers to your queries and displaying very little text or additional information. Siri, on the other hand, is more visual-based, serving up plenty of charts and graphs to go with its answers. But in the end Brownlee said he judges how capable a personal digital assistant is based on how much like a robot the user needs to speak like to get the correct answers. Since Google Assistant is better able to detect what you want using conversational and contextual learning, it’s more natural to use and thus more competent.
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