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Google Assistant Is Smarter Than Alexa, Study Finds (cnet.com)
For the second year in a row, a study found that Google's digital assistant is smarter than Amazon's assistant, Alexa. The study does note that Alexa is catching up and was far and away the most improved from 2017 and 2018. CNET reports the findings: Digital marketing company Stone Temple released the results of its 2018 smart speaker quiz earlier this week. It did a similar test last year in which it asked digital assistants roughly 5,000 questions to see which assistants answer the most correctly. For the first time this year, Stone Temple asked the questions separately to Google Assistant on the company's Home smart speaker, and an Assistant-equipped phone. The study found that Google Assistant attempts the most responses, and gets the most attempted responses correct. Strangely, Assistant performed even better on a phone than on a smart speaker. Surprisingly, Microsoft's Cortana took second place, with Alexa trailing both and Siri lagging far behind the rest. Alexa doubled the number of questions it was able to answer from 2017 and Microsoft's assistant improved as well, with Google holding relatively steady at the top while its competition catches up.
When Jeff Bezos realizes that, he'll enter the search engine biz. Maybe he'll buy Microsoft, keep Bing and Azure cloud, and sell the rest to China.
Table-ized A.I.
I recently said to my phone, "OK, Google, is it supposed to rain today? When you answer, keep in mind that you got this question wrong yesterday."
To my surprise, it replied with a list of links to alternative digital assistants I could install.
is a question Siri can't answer. Tried that yesterday eight times and had three coworkers try that each at least two times. One of the responses gave us directions to Austin, TX I assume because that is the home of Whole Foods. If AI isn't good enough to give us directions to a store a couple of blocks away, it's just useless and not even worth discussing.
No, actually I think its because Google had already analyzed everything that all the Stone Temple employees said and did via email, chat, orders on the web, and past web search history.
Google Assistant already figured out who was doing the study and what questions they were going to ask, so they had the answers ready for them before hand. The web searches were just to make the competition look legit to the judges so they would not catch on.
Alexa on the other hand only knows what Stone Temple employees ordered online from Amazon, and last I checked you still could not order "test questions" from Amazon, even with Prime Membership.