“Apple’s Siri, introduced as the big new feature in the iPhone 4S, is facing its biggest competitor to date in Samsung’s S Voice, an extremely similar voice-activated mobile assistant that will make its retail debut with the Galaxy S III early next week,” Vlad Savov reports for The Verge.
“Both Siri and S Voice have a tendency to rely on external search engines for their results, sometimes integrating them in stub form within the app and sometimes throwing you out to a Google search. S Voice does the latter quite a bit more often than Siri does,” Savov reports. “In terms of speed, Siri has a distinct advantage over S Voice. It consistently provides an answer ahead of its Samsung competitor… Siri is also a lot more vocal than Samsung’s application. The majority of queries sent to the iPhone are greeted with an aural affirmation of some sort, whereas S Voice tends to provide results quietly (and also includes the option to turn off audio responses altogether). Which of the two approaches you prefer will be a matter of personal preference.”
Savov reports, “Taken in totality, I would say that S Voice offers a very good approximation of what Siri adds to the iPhone — helping you take notes, look things up, schedule meetings, or check the weather — but that extra functionality isn’t yet useful or polished enough to make these voice assistants a real selling point for new phones.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sheesh. Obviously, the accent of the tester is an issue. A better test would be to use multiple people asking the same questions with different accents and tabulating the results.
Regardless, the slavish copiers at Samsung continue to have no shame. Let’s see how their Siri knockoff does when real Android settlers are hitting the hell out of their cut-rate data center that’s guaranteed to be nowhere near the quaility or capacity of Apple’s billion dollar+ data centers. Anyone who buys into “S Voice” thinking it’s “the same as Siri” is a fool.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Martin” for the heads up.]