With yesterday’s announcement of a suite of new Google Home features — including voice calls and music streaming support — Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are now more similar than ever before. The inevitable question of which is best for you largely comes down to personal taste, as well as what devices you already own, but there’s no denying that the trio of digital assistants definitely have their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to voice recognition. That’s made abundantly clear in a new video test conducted by Wired, but the results aren’t really even close.
In the video, eight different testers, each with different accents, ask a variety of questions to Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The American, British, Scottish, Irish, Australian, Japanese, Italian and German accents each create unique challenges for the algorithms that make the assistants work, and it quickly becomes clear that some of them just aren’t up to certain tasks.
The total number of test questions — a modest four — isn’t necessarily a large enough sample to declare any one device universally better than the others, but the results certainly paint a nice picture for Google. The Assistant manages to top both Alexa and Siri in the majority of the tests across all accents, and even when it isn’t the undisputed winner, it’s close on the heels of the top dog.
If we’re handing out awards, Siri would come in second place with a solid performance, while Alexa falls in last. This certainly isn’t the end-all, be-all test of capability, but it’s definitely something worth considering, especially if you don’t speak bare-bones American.
