Apple’s Siri improved by 11 percentage points in correct answers over the last 15 months

“We asked Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana 800 questions each,” Gene Munster and Will Thompson report for Loup Ventures. “This time, Google Assistant was able to answer 86% of them correctly vs. Siri at 79%, Alexa at 61%, and Cortana at 52%.”

“As part of our ongoing effort to better understand the practical use cases of AI and the emergence of voice as a computing input, we regularly test the most common digital assistants and smart speakers. This time, we focused solely on smartphone-based digital assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana),” Munster and Thompson report. “We added Alexa (on the iOS app) to the mix this round, which means, going forward, we will now test the four major voice assistants on both smartphones and smart speakers.”

“We asked each digital assistant the same 800 questions, and they are graded on two metrics: 1. Did it understand what was being asked? 2. Did it deliver a correct response?” Munster and Thompson report. “Google Assistant continued its outperformance, answering 86% correctly and understanding all 800 questions. Siri was close behind, correctly answering 79% and only misunderstanding 11 questions. Alexa correctly answered 61% and misunderstood 13. Cortana was the laggard, correctly answering just 52% and misunderstanding 19.”

 
“Google Assistant has the edge in every category except Command,” Munster and Thompson report. “We found Siri to be slightly more helpful and versatile (responding to more flexible language) in controlling your phone, smart home, music, etc. Our question set also includes a fair amount of music-related queries (the most common action for smart speakers). Apple, true to its roots, has ensured that Siri is capable with music on both mobile devices and smart speakers.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Not a bad showing by a pre-Giannandrea Siri!

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Gene Munster: Poaching AI chief John Giannandrea from Google a win for Apple – April 5, 2018
Apple hires Google’s A.I. chief to improve Siri – April 4, 2018
With IBM Watson Services for Core ML, Apple and IBM add machine learning muscle to enterprise iOS pact – March 20, 2018