Google Now beats out Siri and Cortana

When it comes to answering your questions, what would win in an intelligence, voice-activated battle between iPhone’s Siri, Android’s Google Now and Windows Phone’s Cortana? According to one consulting company, Google Now is the smartest option. Conducted by consulting firm Stone Temple, a team asked 3,000 voice queries to Siri, Google Now and Cortana. The questions asked were required to have a specific answer, including questions like “What’s 18 divided by two,” “Who invented Facebook,” and “What does the fox say?” The search engine assistant only received credit if they answered the question with the exact right answer.

Apple’s famous artificial intelligence agent is eating some humble pie today. Ask Siri “Who is smarter, Siri or Google Now?” and Siri obligingly links to an article about a recent 3,086-question challenge that ranked Google Now as the top scorer. Unfortunately for Siri, the quiz had some built-in biases. Designed by the Stone Temple digital marketing group, the purpose of the exercise was to explore a giant, new knowledge base that Google was rumored to be building. Google’s mysterious “Knowledge Vault,” which was reported by the New Scientist in August, caused a tumult in the SEO community, which lives or dies by its ability to understand how Google prioritizes responses to search queries. (Google later said the project was mischaracterized by the magazine–though Google does work continuously to expand the knowledge base it uses to respond to search queries.)