There are those who will say that, as far as virtual assistants go, Siri is lagging behind other virtual assistants, such as Cortana and Google Now. But it seems that, according to a hands-on user study conducted y Expert Exchange, this isn’t the case. Due to contrary belief, Siri isn’t lagging behind, but rather, is in the lead of the virtual assistant group.
When it comes to overall satisfaction, Siri has beat out both Google Now and Cortana across a number of specific tasks. In case you were wondering, Amazon Echo was no where to be seen in the study.
Although the number of people that took part in the study isn’t clear, here is how Expert Exchange described the methodology:
We ran a survey asking participants to perform a list of commands on their smartphones. With these findings, the virtual assistants were ranked based on accuracy (whether or not the virtual assistant properly responded) and satisfaction (how happy users were with the way the virtual assistant performed the command) All participants were randomly selected, and users were required to use Cortana, Siri or Google Now.
When it came down to testing each of the virtual assistants, those who participated asked a series of factual questions, conducted searches and offered commands to each. Accuracy was measured, as well as user satisfaction. In almost all categories, Siri won.
But, in a study conducted a year ago by Stone Temple Consulting, Google Now came out as the winner, while Siri came in second place. Although these studies were conducted by two different groups, perhaps the results from both indicate that Siri has either gotten more refined, or that the overall studies were conducted differently enough to come out with two clearly different results.