In our previous feature story, we covered three personal assistant apps that are currently dominating the market: Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. While all three delivered satisfying performances, Google Assistant stood out as the personal assistant app closest to a complete package, thanks to its widespread integration and an enormous database. But even if the performances were pleasant and entertaining for the most part, overall there’s still much work to do. Stumbling on simple requests, lack of personality and inability to do more complex things are just some parts of the often rough experience of using personal assistant apps.
Yet hope springs eternal. This time, we are focusing on the up-and-comers vying for the throne of best personal assistant. We have singled out a group of worthy challengers we deem are closest to dethroning the former trio in one way or another. These are Charlie, Hound, Viv AI and Wonder.
The best new personal assistant app: Charlie, Hound, Viv, and Wonder
First up, we have Charlie, a digital personal assistant app available on iOS. The main purpose of Charlie is being your business secretary. It was based on an idea to easily obtain details on the business people customers are about to have a meeting with. That is exactly what Charlie does – searches Internet sources for information you need to know before a meeting.
Next up on our list is Hound, a voice-powered digital assistant that comes from SoundHound. If the company’s name sounds familiar, you may recognize it as the music recognition mobile app. Its digital agent aims big – Hound is quite keen to be the go-to voice interface for mobile devices.
Viv is the new creation from the team that invented Siri. Samsung recently purchased this very promising AI startup and we expect a lot from it in the near future. Still, the assistant app is still in demo mode and there’s no word on exactly when it will be available for testing.
Last but not least, we have Wonder. Wonder is a startup that has created an app with the intention of asserting itself as your primary research tool. It was built for questions that require deeper understanding and multiple points of view.
Determining the winner
For testing, we used a different approach this time. The reason why is because we wanted this to be a fair fight as much as possible. Unlike in our previous testing, most of these apps target specific areas of assistance. Therefore, it would be illogical to test these assistants against each other on a multi-faceted layer as previously performed. In this case, we’ll sum up all the pros and cons of each challenger and see which one comes closest to being a full virtual assistant and a worthy challenger.
With that out of the way, let’s move on to the interesting stuff.
Charlie app
The intention here is quite clear – use Charlie as your first and foremost business assistant. On that basis alone, Charlie delivers a superb experience. The app sends via email a one‐page overview of people you’re about to meet with. This pre-meeting report also appears as a push notification and includes a variety of information. Things you have in common, their professional background, recent personal and company news, critical insights on their company and so on – the list of items is quite long. Charlie provides whatever data is relevant to the meeting at hand. This includes Google News, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook and Twitter posts among a myriad of sources. The iOS app is integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar, which makes it friendly for both businesses and individual users.
The beauty of Charlie is that it only takes a few minutes to set you up with a detailed dossier that is neatly done and categorized. It’s a huge time saver and a great tool for business research. We’d like to see more integration with other services, as well as some form of offline database for immediate use. However, looking at the big picture (which we are) in terms of virtual assistance – Charlie is “only” a thorough personal assistant that, after all, depends much on the level of publicly available information.
Hound app
This voice assistant app for iOS and Android is as close as it gets to a polished virtual assistance experience. Similar to Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, you activate Hound by saying “OK Hound” and state your intent. The assistant app has an excellent understanding of complex requests so you can speak naturally with it and include real, natural phrases. Hound actually responds accordingly to follow-up questions after the initial query. For instance, prompting it to show the restaurants in a two-mile radius, their working hours and how to get there posed no problem for Hound. This is possible partly thanks to its solid third-party integration which most notably includes Yelp, Uber, Accuweather and Expedia.
There are a number of things that Hound carries out successfully. Finding local businesses, playing music, getting news, making phone calls and sending text messages, answering random questions, language translation, providing weather information, navigating to a certain direction, as well as helping you with hotel booking and getting you an Uber ride are some of the things this personal assistant performs with great accuracy and ease.
Hound has very little personality so you won’t get much out of it in terms of entertainment and casual chitchat. You can play a few interactive games, though. Hound uses SoundHound’s own database, not Google’s, which does have its faults. Sometimes, it redirects to Microsoft Bing if it doesn’t know the answer, even if it’s an easy one. Other smaller drawback is that the third-party integration is limited. SoundHound seems to focus on promoting their own services such as Houndify, which allows third-party developers to add voice to their own devices and services. This is perfectly fine from a business point of view. However, in the market dominated by big names, you need all the firepower you can get and Hound somewhat lacks in that department. The company is working on it though, allowing for third-party API to enrich its skilled competitor in the personal assistant race.
Viv AI app
Often dubbed Siri’s little sister, Viv differs from other assistants in the way it utilizes its AI component. Thanks to something called dynamic program generation, Viv processes your voice command to understand its intent. Then, it chooses an internal program to write a code for the answer in a fraction of a second. This is in contrast with following a set of pre-written codes, which is how much of the current personal assistants work. Viv is able to answer very specific questions about weather, book hotel rooms under certain parameters and make detailed Uber arrangements. There are plans for a number of third-party apps like Hotels.com, Uber, Venmo and others.
You have to remember that this is all according to a public demo that took place last year. There is little actual proof that Viv delivers all those experiences outside of prepared demos. This is the main reason why we are not overly excited with Viv. Still, there is no denying the demonstration showed off some impressive understanding of complex queries.
Wonder app
In short, Wonder is a personal research assistant that employs other people. Basically, it’s a human search engine. You submit a question to Wonder and the end result is a well-written summary of rich insights. The major advantage of Wonder is it saves time on searches you’d perform in order to obtain the relevant information. The trick is to ask anything that relates to real research, otherwise simple and straightforward queries have little effect. Depending on the volume of research, you usually get an answer under an hour.
In a way, Wonder “suffers” the same fate as Charlie does. It’s a single purpose assistant, even if its scope of research is vast. However, a more pressing issue is the fact that there is no mobile app for it. Wonder is a web-only service which is puzzling as it’s merely a basic platform for ordinary text input. There is no information on whether it will be available on mobile devices anytime soon.
Fin App (Updated November, 2017)
Coming on strong in recent months, and backed by Silicon Valley royalty like Sam Lessin, the Fin app is earning plaudits as the bridge step between human assistants and full AI. Fin is an all-purpose assistant, but it uses a combination of Siri-like voice AI with a network of humans to fill in where the machine learning falls short. Unlike other apps, Fin comes at significant cost – $1 per minute, with a minimum of $120 per month. At this stage, reviews on Fin are mixed, at best.
End results: the best non-Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa Personal Assistant App
In terms of potential, Viv definitely has it in abundance. However, it’s not available yet which makes Hound our pick as a serious contender for the assistant throne. It’s not just that it comes closest to an all-around personal assistant among our challengers. It’s the level of accuracy and its skills to seamlessly produce a correct and complete answer that make Hound a credible alternative for Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
However, that is not to say that our other “contestants” have no merit. On the contrary – Charlie is an excellent business resource that excels in its area. Those looking for a quality research on their business prospect will find it extremely handy and a better choice for the task than any other personal assistant. The same goes for Wonder. You can count on it to perform any deep research in an organized and comprehensive manner, which is something no other assistant can accomplish. There’s a valid reason why Viv has created such a buzz in the tech community. The demo showed off marvelous details of accuracy and almost a next-gen experience in the interaction with voice assistants. Add in the team’s Siri background and you can understand the hype. It looks like we’ll get to experience a new level of accuracy and ease of use once it goes into public circulation. Another important factor here is Samsung who has the means to make Viv widespread across numerous products and services.
Either way, using any of these four apps has multiple advantages that warrant you to give them a try.
Conclusion: the best new personal assistant app
This is a relatively small sample of personal assistant apps out there. As 2016 was the catalyst for the virtual assistant boom, things are still heating up. Almost all of the artificial intelligence assistants available for public use are under development round the clock with frequent updates on a regular basis. By constantly improving ways to understand and comprehend our commands, as well as allowing third-party presence for new services, tech companies plan to have their digital helpers do more for you anywhere and anytime. There still much work for challengers such as Hound and Viv to perfect their trade and further integrate into widespread circulation. So far, they’re on a good path.