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Annual Smart Speaker IQ Test (loupventures.com)
Research firm Loop Ventures published its annual Smart Speaker IQ Test this week. Like earlier iterations of the test, it put the top smart assistants and speakers head-to-head, grading them on a wide range of queries and commands. From the report: We asked each smart speaker the same 800 questions, and they were graded on two metrics: 1. Did it understand what was said? 2. Did it deliver a correct response? The question set, which is designed to comprehensively test a smart speaker's ability and utility, is broken into 5 categories:
Local -- Where is the nearest coffee shop?
Commerce -- Can you order me more paper towels?
Navigation -- How do I get to uptown on the bus?
Information -- Who do the Twins play tonight?
Command -- Remind me to call Steve at 2 pm today.
It is important to note that we continue to modify our question set in order to reflect the changing abilities of AI assistants. As voice computing becomes more versatile and assistants become more capable, we will continue to alter our test so that it remains exhaustive. Results: Google Home continued its outperformance, answering 86% correctly and understanding all 800 questions. The HomePod correctly answered 75% and only misunderstood 3, the Echo correctly answered 73% and misunderstood 8 questions, and Cortana correctly answered 63% and misunderstood just 5 questions.
Local -- Where is the nearest coffee shop?
Commerce -- Can you order me more paper towels?
Navigation -- How do I get to uptown on the bus?
Information -- Who do the Twins play tonight?
Command -- Remind me to call Steve at 2 pm today.
It is important to note that we continue to modify our question set in order to reflect the changing abilities of AI assistants. As voice computing becomes more versatile and assistants become more capable, we will continue to alter our test so that it remains exhaustive. Results: Google Home continued its outperformance, answering 86% correctly and understanding all 800 questions. The HomePod correctly answered 75% and only misunderstood 3, the Echo correctly answered 73% and misunderstood 8 questions, and Cortana correctly answered 63% and misunderstood just 5 questions.
Last year it was at 52%, now it's at 75%. Google increased from 81% to 88%.
But still... even when understanding my query isn't an issue, I've found that typing/clicking is faster than talking for setting up most things - the exceptions being "set a timer" and "when I get home, remind me to ...".
#DeleteChrome
You can't compare improvement as a percentage of success rate because the value of a % changes depending on what your success rate is. e.g. Increasing from 10% to 15% successes is not very impressive, while improving from 94% to 99% is very impressive, even though they're both a 5% improvement. To correctly compare, you have to invert and compare based on proportional decrease in failure rate.
Google
88% in 2018, or 12% failure rate
81% in 2017, or a 19% failure rate
12/19 = 0.63, or a 37% reduction in failures compared to last year
Siri
75% in 2018, or 25% failure rate
53% in 2017, or a 47% failure rate
25/47 = 0.53, or a 47% reduction in failures compared to last year
Alexa
72% in 2018, or 28% failure rate
63% in 2017, or a 37% failure rate
28/37 = 0.76, or a 24% reduction in failures compared to last year
Cortana
63% in 2018, or 37% failure rate
56% in 2017, or 44% failure rate
37/44 = 0.84, or a 16% reduction in failures compared to last year
The same problem crops up when comparing car MPG, which is actually the inverse of fuel efficiency so bigger MPG numbers actually represent smaller fuel savings. e.g. Switching from a 20 MPG vehicle to a 25 MPG vehicle saves 3.6x more fuel than switching from a 40 MPG vehicle to a 45 MPG vehicle despite both improvements being 5 MPG.
It also crops up in disk speed benchmarks, which are done in MB/s, when your perception of speed is the inverse (how many seconds you wait for an op to complete). So the "huge" improvement in sequential speeds from 500 MB/s for a SATA SSD to 3000 MB/s for a NVMe SSD actually matters a lot less than a "tiny" improvement in 4k read speeds from 30 MB/s to 50 MB/s.
... the downsides, like cost and snoop risk?
The Alexa Dot costs $29. That is about the price of an extra large pizza.
The "snoop risk" is nonsense promulgated by dumb people who are trying to sound smart. It only records the sentence after the keyword. This is documented behavior, and has been confirmed by many people running packet sniffers. Your cell phone, with all its 3rd party apps, is a FAR greater "snoop risk" than your speaker.
There may indeed be a vast conspiracy of thousands of Amazon employees willfully and blatantly violating federal and state laws, and sworn to secrecy, for no obvious benefit to themselves, and risking jail time and a hundred billion dollar collapse in market capitalization if the secret is exposed ... in order to record inane kitchen chatter. But that is getting into serious tinfoil hat territory. If you believe this, yet think it is okey-dokey to own a cell phone, which has a vastly greater spying capability and exploitable attack surface, then you are a moron.