With the emergence of artificial technology, there has also been an increasing number of AI-powered personal assistants. Almost every major tech company is involved with digital agents in one way or another. The pool of choice becomes larger with options on every corner. Thus, comparisons begin to arise and you begin to see lists, charts, and tables of assistants pitted against each other. For this article, we have performed a detailed analysis of the two of the most popular AI assistants – Google Assistant and Siri. We focused on pointing out the abilities the former has over the latter. It’s a widely accepted opinion that Siri, among the first to break the mold of AI assistance, is also the one who lags the most. What is also regarded is that Google Assistant is currently the best AI assistant around, although that’s a game being constantly played with no final result.
There is a greater deal of abilities that Google Assistant successfully performs than the ones presented further below. Since the agent is broadening its scope beyond Google Pixel smartphones and other select few, many are wondering what it can do. For a more comprehensive overview, you can refer to our previous article as for this one, we will be highlighting only some of its numerous features. Although Google’s offspring is still relatively new to the assistant race, its access to endless information from Google’s database makes it smarter and more intuitive than Siri. We’ll show you how much of that is true and exactly what can Google Assistant do that Siri can’t. For instance…
Google Assistant can present daily briefings
Daily briefing is a smart feature which basically gives an overview of your day in advance. Since it pulls data from Google’s cloud services, Google Assistant searches your calendar entries and email for scheduled meetings. It can also provide a weather report, a traffic report on your route to work and a summary of the latest news stories. To enable daily briefing, you need to launch the Google Assistant and simply say “Good morning.“ The feature also works with “Good Afternoon” and “Good Evening” for each part of the day. The beauty of this feature is that it’s highly customizable, meaning you can select your weather, traffic and news sources, as well as schedule daily updates to pop up at specific times.
Google Assistant draws from the Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph is Google’s huge collection of real-world data used to improve search engine results. When we say huge, we mean over 70 billion facts huge. The information comes from various sources and presents itself in the form of semantic search, meaning it improves search accuracy by understanding the intent and the context of terms The assistant will read the information aloud and provide links for related searches. On top of all, the Knowledge Graph has a useful Wikipedia integration which instantly provides the desired result in most cases.
While this is something that Siri definitely can’t do, at least it offers a sort-of alternative in using Microsoft Bing as its default search engine and integration with Wolfram Alpha’s database. However, the volume of data and integration doesn’t come close to Google’s all-around deep integration.
Google Assistant for real-time translation
This one is a no-brainer. For years, Google Translate has been the benchmark for online translation, despite its evident shortcomings. Google enhanced the feature over the years, adding more language support and improving accuracy to present more natural translations. All of this lead to real-time translation, one of the more striking features of Google Assistant.
While Google Translate does its job well, you still need to open the app and type what you want translated. Alternatively, you could highlight the text in a foreign language and get a pop-up option to translate it. Real-time translation eliminates all that hassle. With Google Assistant, just say “Translate [word or a phrase of your choice] in [ the language of your choice]” and the assistant will immediately speak out the translation right back to you, as well as write it out. There are over 100 languages supported and you can also use the feature to translate longer phrases. As for Siri, Apple’s personal agent seriously lags in this area, struggling with the basics, let alone advanced translation options.
Google Assistant can recite poetry
For the poets among us, Google Assistant is able to recite poetry. This is not a random mishmash of words or a lame attempt at haiku. This is bonafide poetry from the works of famous poets like Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Keats and every other poet the assistant plucks right from the web. As a bonus, you can follow up one poem with another and have them delivered on a daily basis.
Siri, on the other hand, lacks the contextual brainpower in this case. It simply produces a made-up poem, a programmed response instead of an actual poem.
Google Assistant can take selfies
We all know how much modern generations appreciate a selfie. It seems that Google recognized this as well as it has implemented a feature that takes a picture of you. Upon your request, the digital agent launches the camera app, starts a three-second timer and then snaps a selfie. Siri falls short of actually taking a picture, although it launches the app and changes to the front-facing camera.
Google Assistant can play games
This is where Google Assistant outright crushes Siri. The development team behind the agent definitely put a lot of effort into making the assistant a fun, lightweight companion. It can quickly kill boredom with a number of fun and interesting games. You can choose between trivia quiz games, games based around chat, a doodle game, audio game, “toss a coin” (complete with sound effects) and “guess the number” games (for when all options fail) or just play classics like tic-tac-toe, solitaire and others.
As you can see, there is a wide range of options available to fill some spare time or amuse yourself. Siri finds this level of entertainment beyond her capabilities, which is strange because this is Apple we are talking about.
Routines
Based on a September, 2017 teardown of the Google Assistant AKP, there is a belief Google Assistant is moving Shortcuts into a more machine learning-based technology called Routines. So while now, you might have an Assistant shortcut for “Bedtime”, in the future Assistant will learn your typical time for bed and what you like to do around that time (shut down email, turn down the lights if you have smart bulbs or turn off your smart appliances, etc). When this feature rolls out remains to be seen.
Conclusion
Today’s fast-paced tech environment means that every bit counts in a fight for the market dominance. In terms of digital personal assistants, it’s the features and capabilities that separate one from the other. They give a sorely needed competitive edge and an eye-catching form. The Google Assistant has been built in such a way that you can truly call it an intelligent digital assistant. It’s learning about you all the time, anticipating your needs, keeping you company and so on. Generally, it’s making your life so much easier.
Hence, it’s easy to see why, with the recent launch of Google’s agent on the iOS platform, many postulate Siri is no longer the best assistant on its native OS (although Alexa also plays a significant role in this development), let alone the best of the bunch. In this article, we’ve seen several examples, some more simple than others, how Google Assistant edges out Siri, even though the latter had a head start since 2011. It’s evident that Apple has done little (or not enough) to retain that advantage. On the other hand, Google is fully utilizing its ecosystem to complement its voice agent with numerous integrations of its services. This currently makes it one of the best personal assistants around, if not the best.