Voice assistants are growing quickly, changing our lives, and making things easier. It’s your personal voice assistant who is always ready to help you whenever you need it.
Loup Ventures recently released its semi-annual report on smartphone-based digital assistants, and there is good news if you also enjoy giving voice commands to your phone, tablet, or speaker. Their report shows that all three leading digital assistants – Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri – are getting better at their jobs, but one still holds the top spot.
For the second year in a row, the research firm found that Google is significantly ahead of Amazon and Apple. The study tested the AI systems by asking each the same 800 questions and graded them on understanding and accuracy of their responses.
According to the results, Google once again was the best performer, understanding every single query they asked (100% accuracy) and answering correctly 92.9% of them – that’s up from 85.5% correct last year.
Siri was the next, which understood 99.8% of questions and answered 83.1% correctly (78.5% correct answer level in 2018), while Alexa understood 99.9% and correctly answered 80%, which jumped from a surprising low of 61.4% last year. The research firm notes that it’s the largest jump it has seen in years since it started recording results.
Loup’s testing covered five different categories – local, commerce (ordering an item online), navigation, information, and command – each designed to test the different abilities of AI assistants. Google Assistant dominated four of those five categories, while Siri outperformed Google Assistant in the command category.
Most of us might expect Alexa to be best at questions about ordering goods; Loup Ventures said in the Blog Post that Google Assistant actually had the widest lead in the commerce category.
Research like this helps us track the state of digital assistants, though it doesn’t provide a complete picture. Each assistant has their own unique abilities, which are not represented in these categories. Also, the assistant you use is largely determined by what kind of phone you have.
However, from the results, it is pretty clear that Google’s extensive investment in its assistant has paid off.
