Gerrit De Vynck, Bloomberg News:
Google said its digital assistant is used by more than 500 million people every month. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a win for Google, or a big miss.
On the one hand, having the voice-controlled technology on over half a billion devices far outstrips main rival Amazon.com Inc., which said last year that more than 100 million gadgets had been sold with its Alexa digital assistant. However, Google’s Android operating system runs on roughly 2.5 billion devices. That suggests the Google Assistant either isn’t available with some of these products, or that many people aren’t using the service.
MacDailyNews Take: Two years ago, Apple announced that Siri was actively used on over 500 million devices every month, up from 375 million just 6 months prior (June 2017), so we imagine that Siri is still, by far, the most popular voice assistant on the planet.
Both the author and MDN try to compare units/gadgets actively using Alexa or Siri to Google’s claim of people actively using Assistant. It is highly likely that the latter has some people using multiple units/gadgets and given Apple users’ penchant for having multiple devices vs Android, the Siri count likely tallies the same person/user multiple times. Hard to claim ‘most popular’ when you’re not comparing the ‘same’ measure.