Q: How does Google Assistant compare to Siri when it comes to using voice commands?
A: The ability to use your voice to control devices is one of the biggest arms races in the tech sector at the moment.
Voice recognition technology has come a long way from the early Bell Labs research in the 1950s that could only recognize 10 spoken digits.
Voice recognition programs that touted a 90% accuracy rate started to appear in the 90s, which sounded great until we realized that every 10th word would be incorrect.
Today, the voice recognition technology in our smartphones is pretty incredible, especially when you use it for dictation, but it still has a long way to go.
As with all voice recognition platforms, the user must learn how to speak to their device instead of the device learning how to understand the user.
Simple commands like 鈥渨hat鈥檚 today鈥檚 weather look like?,鈥� 鈥渃all my office,鈥� or 鈥渟et a timer for 6 minutes鈥� work very well on both platforms, but when it comes to more complex questions, there is a difference.
Recent testing results
An AI training company called Bespoken performed a series of tests with both simple and complex questions asked to Google Assistant, Siri and Amazon Alexa.
Google answered the simple questions correctly 76.57% of the time, Alexa 56.29% of the time and Siri at 47.29% of the time.
The results for answering the complex questions correctly, which involved comparisons, composition and/or temporal reasoning was similar in ranking: Google 70.18%, Alexa 55.05% and Siri 41.32%.
Bespoken chief evangelist there were two major takeaways from the initial research.
鈥淔irst, while Google Assistant outperformed Alexa and Siri in every category, all three have significant room for improvement,” Sklar said.
Google Assistant recognizes context
One of the biggest differences between the two systems is Google Assistant鈥檚 ability to recognize context better, which can make interacting with it a bit more conversational.
There鈥檚 an option to turn on Continued Conversations in settings of Assistant that will eliminate the need to use the wake-up command 鈥淥K Google” or “hey Google鈥� to ask a follow-up question.
For example, if you ask Assistant 鈥渨hat the weather is like today,鈥� you can follow up with 鈥渁nd what about tomorrow?鈥� without having to start over.
When you鈥檙e finished with any interaction, you can say “thank you,” “thanks, Google” or “I’m done” to complete the session.
Google Assistant on iPhone
Google Assistant works best on Android devices, especially Google鈥檚 own Pixel line of smartphones, but it can be as well.
The list of commands that can be used by Google Assistant continues to grow 鈥� for every device that uses it.
For those that want to stick with Siri, of commands.
Smart home considerations
If you鈥檙e entering into smart devices in the home, it鈥檚 important to understand which ones work on the same platform so they can all work together and with your phone.
The ability to create routines in Google Assistant or Shortcuts in Siri can execute multiple commands that will control temperature, lighting, music, etc. all at once if you鈥檝e assembled a cohesive smart home.
