Google Assistant is still the smartest digital helper, and getting even smarter

Every six months Loop Ventures puts the various digital assistants to the sword to see which comes out best. This year they have performed their usual testing on Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa (sorry Samsung, Bixby still isn’t even in the frame) and the results may not surprise you but it shows how much they are improving each year.

Loop Ventures asked each digital assistant the same 800 questions and then graded them on whether they understood what they were being asked and whether they responded correctly/accurately. The questions were broken down into five categories:

• Local — eg. Where is the nearest gym?
• Commerce — eg. Order me some more protein powder
• Navigation — eg. How do I get to Venice Beach on the bus?
• Information — eg. Who is competing in the Olympia tonight?
• Command — eg. Remind me to call Arnold at 2pm today

Testing was conducted using Siri on iOS 12.4, Google Assistant on Pixel XL running Android 9 Pie, and Alexa via the iOS app. Smart home devices tested include Wemo Mini plug, TP-Link Kasa plug, Phillips Hue Lights, and Wemo Dimmer Switch.

For yet another year Google Assistant performed the best answering 93 percent of the questions correctly while understanding every single question asked of it. Siri came in second place this year, overtaking Alexa, answering 83 percent of the questions correctly and was able to understand all but two of the questions correctly. Alexa on the other hand only misunderstood one question but answered a miserable 79.8 percent of the questions correctly.

In the breakdown for each category listed above Google Assistant was the best for all except the command section where Siri stood tall with Siri’s integration into the OS for phone-related functions still better than Google Assistant’s. Alexa, being a third party app on phones was in a distant third place in this category and most likely accounted for its poor overall result.

Surprisingly Alexa was NOT at the top of the commerce section and considering that is the sole reason for Alexa living it is a shock. Google Assistant was far ans away the leader here with 92 percent of questions answered correctly versus 71 percent for Alexa and 68 percent for Siri.

When they compared each digital assistant’s performance improvements over the year Alexa improved the most which more shows how much it needed to improve because it still trails the other two. Google Assistant improved by 7 percent, Siri by 5 percent and Alexa by a whopping 18 percent.

As we can see by the above trends all of the digital assistants are improving and with more and more functionality being added each year they will most likely continue to improve in the coming years. Hopefully, for us Android users, Google Assistant remains the best for a long time to come.