Apple’s Siri assistant is improving its speech recognition skills and the ability to answer questions correctly, but it’s still lagging behind the Google Assistant – at least according to one study.
Loup Ventures’ annual report on digital assistants found that Siri understands the user’s query on 99% of occasions, which is up from 95% when the firm ran the test in 2017. However, the Google Assistant now has a perfect record of understanding queries (99% in 2017).
In terms of answering the query correctly Google Assistant wins by a considerable distance. It nailed 85.5% of queries (up from 74%), while Siri achieved the objective on 78.5% of the time compared to 66.1% in 2017.
Alexa was added to the tests this year (its omission last year is strange), but it lags way behind Siri and Google, according to the test, which asked the AI tools 800 questions.
Alexa understood 98% of these 800 questions pertaining to local information, shopping requests, navigation requests, information like sporting fixtures and commands like “remind me to call Steve at 2pm today.” However, it only managed to answer correctly 61.4% of the time.
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Cortana, which was included last year, was at the back of the pack, with 98% of queries understood and 52.4% answered correctly. Of course, this is only one study and others might find different results based upon the voices doing the asking – certainly in terms of accuracy.
Loup says: “Over a 15-month period, Google Assistant improved by 11 percentage points, Siri 13 points, and Cortana only 3 points in terms of questions answered correctly. We’re impressed with the speed at which the technology is advancing. Many of the issues we had just last year have been erased by improvements to natural language processing and inter-device connectivity.”
Apple’s Siri personal assistant has been around a lot longer than the Google Assistant, so it’s a testament to the Mountain View based firm that its solution has excelled so much in that short time frame.
Are the results of Loup’s tests reflective of your experiences with AI assistants? Drop us a line @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.