“When investment firm Piper Jaffray initially tested Siri in June, its list of common queries found that Google was responsible for about 60 percent of the data returned,” Neil Hughes reports for AppleInsider. “Now, with iOS 6, Google is responsible for only 30 percent of the data.”
“The latest tests also found evidence of behind-the-scenes improvements to Siri, though the changes have been slight,” Hughes reports. “In iOS 5, Siri understood 89 percent of queries spoke in a quiet environment, while that improved to 91 percent in iOS 6, while 76 percent of queries were answered correctly in iOS 5 and that improved to 77 percent with iOS 6.”
Hughes reports, “Since Piper Jaffray’s first Siri test, Google has launched its own voice-driven assistant service, dubbed Google Now. For the latest test, Google Now was included to offer a head-to-head comparison with Siri, and found that Apple’s service has a very slight advantage… Munster wrote, ‘In our test, Siri correctly understood our queries 91% of the time in a quiet environment compared to Google Now at 88%. In terms of accuracy, we determined that Siri accurately answered understood queries 77% of the time compared to 75% for Google Now.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Google’s going to rue the day they got greedy by deciding to try to work against Apple instead of with them. – MacDailyNews, March 09, 2010
fascinating.
Can’t relate to this story. Refused to buy into Apple’s planned obsolescence. Still using my iPhone 4.
If your iPhone 4 was bought within the first 6 months of its release, then you are most likely donating money to your carrier (AT&T, Verizon or Sprint, if you are in America). Unless you are on a pre-paid plan (something like Virgin Mobile, SimpleMobile or similar), you have a two-year contract which expired. This also means that your monthly plan has already paid off your $650 iPhone 4. Since the plan rates don’t go down after contract is up, you are now one of likely hundreds of thousands of mobile customers who happily give a monthly gift of about $20 to their carrier (the amount representing the initial subsidy for the iPhone).
If you want to stay with your carrier, the only way to prevent donating free cash to them is to get a new subsidised phone immediately after becoming eligible for it. You don’t have to use it, if you prefer your iPhone 4 (you can sell it online for over $600 if it is a new iPhone 5).
So, you can either give free money to your carrier, or “buy into Apple’s planned obsolescence”. If I had to choose, I’d prefer the second, as it cost me much less than first. In my case, though, I buy my phones at full price and use much cheaper prepaid carriers. You get much better plans for much less money; so much so that you come out ahead in just little over one year (vs. the two-year contracts). The two-year contract concept is the biggest rip-off known to man.
Very informative… More people need to understand how our carrier subsidies work. However, there is another option: Have AT&T unlock the out of contract iphone, and switch to T-Mobile or Straight Talk. I currently pay $45 a month for unlimited talk/text/web on my iPhone 3GS, and I see no reason to pay $650 for a new iphone until this one stops working.
In your case, the consideration for device upgrade will be exactly what it should be: the value for money. In other words, how much do the features of the newer iPhone mean, compared to the difference in value between the one you have (what you can get for it on eBay) and the one you may want to buy. If at one point you get the need to shoot HD video with a quality camera, talk to SIRI, use Skype / Facetime with a front camera, or have access to LTE network speeds, you’ll likely make that leap, knowing that you can do that whenever you please, with no financial penalty, and you won’t be donating free cash to your mobile operator.
We have a family plan with T-Mobile. All of our 3GS iPhones are factory unlocked. We have 4 phones in the family on the same plan for $148/mo.
In the UK, at the end of your contract you can reduce the monthly price if you don’t wish to upgrade. I stayed with my original provider but pay 1/3 of what I paid on contract. If I wasn’t happy with that price, I could have gone to another “virtual” provider like GiffGaff or Virgin to pay even less.
So I too am currently sticking to my trusty 4. and thus Siri is a mystery to me, as are voice directions on Apple Maps. Google Maps however gave me voice directions for the first time today. It’s great!
“The two-year contract concept is the biggest rip-off known to man.”
Two- year plan! You should try out the wonderful THREE year plan in Canada! Out-f*ckin-rageous!!!
Aside from printer ink…!
Right; although the printer ink racket is a well-known business model (give the razor away free, then charge exorbitant amount on blades). Still, it pretty much works the same way, with some of the people finding ways around it (buying re-manufactured, after-market ink cartridges).
Bully for you. You’ve obviously been living in some sort of cloistered community where regular updating of consumer products never gets acknowledged, whereas the rest of us recognise that it exists, and take advantage of it when it suits us to do so.
There’s nothing at all wrong with the iP4, it’s a perfectly good phone, able to give excellent service for years.
Being a smug asshole about it, though, gets you no brownie points at all.
Statistic error of such tests is way above the difference between results, so nothing really can be derived from this.
I just can’t get used to talking to my phone, I think I must’ve used Siri properly about twice. YMMV.
I was talking to Siri about you, and she tells me that she thinks you are weird. 😉
And I am the counter to that; I talk to mine all the time. Siri only accounts for maybe 10% of that though. The keyboard dictation is what I love. I can say and send a message that way far faster than I can type it.
This to me was the main impetus to upgrade to the iPhone 5. I did skip the 4S, but wish I had not.
To be hones, I was amazed that Google understood most of the time and also it was a lot more faster than SIRI, problem is that Google gives you answers that you will ask to any browser and search engine, that a simple Dictation function that iPhone has already integrated.
Siris does understand you like a human and answers you with a human response most of the time.
I prefer SIRI 100% of the time.
The goal now, of course, is to make Google entirely IRRELEVANT.
If only Google had not turned diabolically evil. They fell for all the bad BIZNIZZ BOZO BS that’s prevalent in our ruinous global economy. Shame on them.
My school uses Google for email, and I cannot change it to something else. Until I graduate I’m stuck with Google for this purpose but I generally use them as little as possible and I will never sign up for Goog or any other service let alone buy android anything. I do not just consider them a backstabbing company that betrayed Apple, I consider them a traitor to the US economy shipping all our phone profits to Samsung and China.
I assume you meant that you consider Apple to be a traitor…
I use a lot of Google stuff all day long. But Google’s ripoffs of Apple have a trail of verified proof. Shameful of Google.
Meanwhile, I’ve been ranting at Apple to get the hell out of China: Criminal Nation for years. I think at this point Apple are well aware of the foolishness of foolishness of their investments in Samsung.
I stutter when I’m hungry. 😉
I can only remember once or twice when Siri didn’t understand my query. Were these people eating french fries at the time?