Google Now is more accurate than Siri

When it come to voice assistants, naturally each company will claim that theirs is better. Apple has Siri while Google has Google Now. However according to a recent test conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst, Gene Munster, it seems that Google Now has managed to edge out Siri in terms of accuracy. To conduct the challenge, Munster took 800 questions and put them to the test by using Siri and Google Now. He then measured both voice assistant’s ability to understand respond to each query. Half of the questions were asked indoors, while the other half were conducted outdoors, presumably to test how well the voice assistants recognized queries in quiet and noisy environments.

The comprehension abilities of Apple’s voice-driven personal assistant Siri continue to get better, but new testing shows that using Google Now for searching on Android has surpassed it in terms of accuracy when answering queries. Analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray did a side-by-side comparison of Apple’s Siri and Google Now this month, and the results of those tests were shared with AppleInsider in a new research note on Tuesday. He found that the Android voice search function correctly answered questions 84 percent of the time, barely edging out Siri, which was 82 percent correct. Both platforms have seen major improvements in comprehension levels. In particular, Siri was found this month to correctly interpret questions 96 percent of the time, up from an 88 percent accuracy rate in tests conducted in December of 2012. But there’s still a disparity between correctly hearing the question and correctly answering it. When Siri heard the question correctly, it still provided the wrong answer 16 percent of the time. Last December, Munster ranked Apple’s Siri with a grade of “C+”, which at the time was even with his assessment of Google Now. But in his latest July rankings, while Siri improved to a “B-“, Google’s search was given a slightly better grade of “B”.