Google Assistant tops Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa in a head-to-head intelligence test
- Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon are all developing competing voice assistants.
- In a test run by Loup Ventures on smartphones, Google Assistant was able to answer the most questions correctly.
Apple's Siri correctly answered more questions that Amazon's Alexa or Microsoft Cortana in a recent test done by analyst Gene Munster's Loup Ventures.
However, the digital assistant with the best record in the test was Google Assistant, which answered 86% of 800 questions correctly.
Here are the Loup Ventures' findings:
In general, the Loup Ventures team found that all of the assistants are getting better over time. It's also worth noting that all four digital assistants now understand the vast majority of people's questions - it's just an issue of having the right answer.
"Both the voice recognition and natural language processing of digital assistants across the board has improved to the point where, within reason, they will understand everything you say to them," the analysts wrote.
The Loup Ventures investors and analysts also noted that what gives the assistants the most trouble is proper nouns, like the name of a town or restaurant.
The tests were conducted on smartphones. Both Cortana and Amazon Alexa were tested through their apps on an iPhone, Siri was tested on an iPhone too, and Google's assistant was tested on a Pixel XL.
The bottom line from the study is that the assistants are improving quickly, especially Google's and Apple's, which improved their percentage of correct answers by 11 percentage points and 13 percentage points, respectively.