Siri continues to receive criticism over at times unreliable performance although Apple’s been advancing its personal digital assistant by leaps and bounds since its debut in October 2011.
Google, on the other hand, is regularly praised for its powerful knowledge graph and accuracy.
You probably know that the search company’s exciting new feature, Assistant, recently made its debut on the new Pixel smartphones.
With that in mind, YouTuber Marques Brownlee took it upon himself to pit the Pixel’s Assistant against the iPhone’s Siri in a cool side-by-side video comparison.
Let the battle of the smartphone voice assistants begin!
In the video below, Brownlee activates Google Assistant and Siri at the same time, then asks them the same questions and follow-ups to see how each one responds.
Some notable observations:
- Both assistants successfully accomplished simple tasks like opening apps, setting appointments and timers, checking the weather and more
- Siri couldn’t answer a follow-up question about Obama’s height
- Assistant didn’t know if the Los Angeles Clippers won the latest game
- Siri didn’t know who won the Super Bowl and the team’s current quarterback
- Google Assistant can’t recognize songs yet
And here’s the video.
Brownlee felt Assistant was more conversational, understood context better, sounded less robotic and had more personality to it that Siri. Siri could handle contextual questions in multiple queries, but she’s not quite up there on the level of Assistant.
On the other hand, Brownleee said Siri’s responses complete with images, charts and other visuals were ultimately more useful to him than Assistant’s spoken information.
Many Pixel reviewers lavished praise on Assistant, but not The New York Times’s Brian X. Chen who called the built-in artificially intelligent virtual assistant “still fairly dumb.”
Of course, as Google’s artificial intelligence gets smarter, the Assistant will become more helpful—but you could say the same thing about Siri, too.
Too bad the technology just isn’t there yet for digital personal assistants to become truly useful, fully conversational and proactive.
In fairness nobody has it, and Google’s is better than what’s offered by competitors like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. The point is that as a whole, smartphone assistants aren’t smart enough to be defining features. They’re gimmicks, and Google unwisely decided to build a phone around one.
Or as The Verge’s Dieter Bohn put it, “Google Assistant is absolutely the smartest of the assistant bunch, but it’s not yet in a class of its own.”
Apple seems to have been ramping up hiring for its new machine learning division.
Its stealth work on artificial intelligence and machine learning came to light in a recent interview which detailed how these techniques have improved not just Siri’s brain and natural language processing, but also features like the Apple Pencil’s palm rejection or iOS 10’s autocorrect suggestions and the Memories feature in Photos.
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