Google Assistant is much smarter than Siri and Alexa

Alexa and Siri aren’t nearly as capable as Google Assistant, according to new research. 

Research firm Loup Ventures recently published its semi-annual report on smartphone-based digital assistants, and the results once again show that Google is significantly ahead of Amazon and Apple. 

To find out which assistant was best, analysts Gene Munster and Will Thompson asked each one the same 800 questions across five different categories and graded them on understanding and accuracy. 

According to their findings, Google Assistant understood every single query they asked and answered correctly 92.9 percent of the time. Siri understood 99.8 percent of questions and answered 83.1 percent correctly, while Alexa understood 99.9 percent and answered correctly 79.8 percent of the time. To put that in perspective, that means Alexa answered approximately 162 questions incorrectly while Google got just 57 wrong. 

Amazon clearly has some work to do.

Still, while research like this helps us track the state of digital assistants, it doesn’t provide a complete picture. Each assistant has its own unique capabilities, which aren’t necessarily represented in these categories. And the assistant you use is largely determined by what kind of smartphone you have. So while Alexa and Google Assistant have their own iPhone apps, you’ll be limited with what you can do with them.

But it’s still pretty clear that Google’s extensive, and sometimes over-the-top, investment in its assistant has paid off. Google outpaced Alexa and Siri in every single category, except for one. Siri was better at “commands,” like sending phone calls and text messages or setting reminders. This was also the worst category for Alexa, which only answered 69 percent of these correctly. 

What’s more surprising is that Amazon’s Alexa also lagged significantly in the commerce category, something you’d think Amazon would have a vested interest in perfecting. Alexa was only able to correctly respond to 71 percent of shopping questions, compared with 92 percent from Google. (Siri came in last with 68 percent in the category.)

Munster and Thompson note that there likely are very few people who actually use their voice assistants to buy things. But they added that their questions in the commerce category were crafted with that fact in mind.

“We believe, based on surveying consumers and our experience using digital assistants, that the number of consumers making purchases through voice commands is insignificant,” they write. “We think commerce-related queries are more geared toward product and service research and local business discovery than actually purchasing something, and our question set reflects that.”

Their findings also highlight just how quickly all of these assistants are evolving. All three assistants have made significant gains over the past year, according to the report. And none moreso than Alexa, which has made “the largest jump in correct answers year over year that we have recorded,” with a gain of 18 points in the last 13 months. 

So while Alexa may still have a lot of work to do to close the gap with Google, it could happen sooner than you think.