When the personal assistant (or Google search) responded with something other than a regular search result, how often did they respond to the question 100% correctly and completely? The data follows:

As it turns out, there are many different ways to not be 100% correct or complete:

The query might have multiple possible answers, such as “how fast does a jaguar go.”

Instead of ignoring a query that it does not understand, the personal assistant may choose to map the query to something it thinks of as “close” to what the user asked for.

The assistant may have provided a partial correct response.

The assistant may have responded with a joke.

Or, it may simply get the answer flat out wrong.

An example of number 2 in the above list is the way that Siri responds to a query such as “awards for Louis Armstrong,” where it responds with a link to a movie about Louis Armstrong. These types of scenarios accounted for a large number of the “not 100% correct” scenarios on Siri.

Which Personal Assistant is the Funniest?

All of the personal assistants tell jokes in response to some questions. Here’s a summary of how many we encountered in our 5,000 query test:

Siri is definitely the leader here, but I find it interesting that the Google Assistant on Google Home is quite a bit funnier than Google search. For example, “do I look fat?” with Google search simply gives me a set of web search results, yet with the Google Assistant on Google Home the answer is, “I like you the way you are.”

There are a few jokes in Google search though. For example, if I search “make me a sandwich”, it does give me a set of regular search results, but its verbal response is “Ha, make it yourself.” With Siri, if you ask “what is love?”, you get a response that varies. One time you might get “I’m not going there,” but if you ask it again you may get a different answer. Interestingly, if you ask it a third time, it seems to give you a serious answer to the question, on the off chance that this is what you actually want.

If you ask Cortana “What’s the meaning of life,” it may say “we all shine on, my friend.”With Alexa, a query like “Who is the best rapper?” will net you the answer: “Eminem. Wait! I forgot about Dre.”

Summary

Google still has the clear lead in terms of overall smarts with both Google search and the Google Assistant on Google Home. Cortana is pressing quite hard to close the gap, and has made great strides in the last three years. Alexa and Siri both face the limitation of not being able to leverage a full crawl of the web to supplement their knowledge bases. It will be interesting to see how they both address that challenge.

One major area not covered in this test is the overall connectivity of each personal assistant with other apps and services. This is an incredibly important part of rating a personal assistant as well. You can expect all four companies to be pressing hard to connect to as many quality apps and service providers as possible, as this will have a major bearing on how effective they all are.

Source: stonetemple