“Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster today reprises a taste test of Apple’s and Google’s natural language speech assistants, seeing progress by both pieces of software, giving the edge to Apple’s Siri by a couple points in terms of the ability to correctly answer questions in general,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
“The primary improvement between Siri in iOS 6 and iOS 7 came from its performance in noisier areas, where Siri was able to translate better through a noisy environment (94% vs. 83% correct in Aug iOS 6). Based on our testing, iOS 7 Siri’s net ability to answer questions (factors in questions not correctly understood) improved to 79% from 77% in August with iOS 6,” Ray reports. “Google Now also answered 79% of questions.”
Ray reports, “Google’s ‘Google Now’ program ‘has been gaining on Apple’s Siri in terms of correct answers in the commerce and local categories,’ he argues, ‘but it still lags significantly in OS commands.'”
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