Marques Brownlee put together the video below, taking Siri and Google Assistant, side by side, through their paces. The set of questions Marques chose were wide in range, but not necessarily definitive. They poked at the boundary of what each assistant did well and poorly, without digging further to find the cliff for each.
There’s a lot to learn watching this. First, it’s clear that Siri holds her own against Google Assistant, despite all the naysaying out there. Neither is perfect, both are useful.
My sense is that both assistants are tree driven, able to answer questions that are within their tree of knowledge. But one cliff for both assistants is context. For example, Marques asked Siri:
Who is the President of the United States?
In response, Siri turned to a web search. Clearly, this particular piece of knowledge, the answer to a relatively obvious question, is not in Siri’s tree.
When Marques followed with:
How tall is he?
Siri, clearly missing the context, produced a web search for this question:
How tall is United States?
To some, this might seem dumb. But this is really a missing branch in Siri’s tree of knowledge.
When Marques asked:
Did the Clippers win?
Siri replied with the score of the previous night’s pre-season game, while Google Assistant replied with the score from the final Clippers game from last season. Clearly, the Google tree of basketball knowledge was missing a branch.
Another example: Marques asked:
Show me some pictures of German Shepherds.
Siri showed web images, Google Assistant found a single YouTube video. Continuing:
Show me pictures of cats.
Siri showed web images of cats, Google Assistant showed pictures of cats from Marques Google Photos collection.
One conclusion you might draw is that Google Assistant knows how to find cats in your photos and Siri does not.
But if Marques has asked:
Show me my pictures of cats.
Siri would have done the same as Google Assistant. So part of the difference, of getting the most from your assistant, is learning the language of your assistant, learning how to lead your assistant appropriately.
I loved this video. To me, it shows how much has been achieved by each team, how much power each assistant brings to the table. I use Siri all the time. While there are certainly moments of frustration, they almost always stem from the form of my question. As long as I stay in Siri’s wheelhouse, I get a tremendous amount of value from Siri.
What’s weird with the show me pictures of cats question is I get the complete opposite when doing it. I am using Google Now on a Nexus 5x and not Assistant, but when I ask Siri to show me pictures of cats she shows me pictures of cats in my personal library. Same as when I ask her on my MacBook. To get Google Now to show me pictures of cats in my Google Photos library I have to say “Show me MY pictures of cats” or I get a Google search for photos of cats.
In my opinion it cannot be the point in 2016 that I as the user have to learn a machines language to communicate with it. I’m getting more and more frustrated with personal voice-controlled assistance (Siri in particular) because I really want them to understand ME. I’m getting tired of trying to understand THEM (which words do I have to use in which order). I know it is really hard for a machine to figure out the actual command from a spoken sentence but I wished there had been more progress until now than just adding more content to it. Getting things right no matter how you formulate a command should be top priority.
Siri still seems like an Apple ‘hobby’ rather than the future of computing. 7 times out of 10 I get random or wrong answers/feedback from Siri.
I don’t use Google Assistant.
“Siri replied with the score of the previous night’s pre-season game, while Google Assistant replied with the score from the final Clippers game from last season. Clearly, the Google tree of basketball knowledge was missing a branch.”
Clearly Google is a real sports fan and knows that nobody cares about preseason games. 🙂
Excellent tests. Funny how similar the voices are.
I ask Siri for the Wikipedia page for a show or film I am watching on television & it says that it isn’t available in the iTunes store for my region & it says this every time I ask. I ask Google & it takes me straight there. I ask Siri for a map & it rarely comes up with the map I want it produces one from a third country. Google does exactly what I ask. I find Cortana works better than Siri but where Siri does compete is when I ask it to send a text message where it is equal to Cortana & Google.