Siri Vs Now: Most people who have an Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone love its voice-operated system, known as Siri. The commercials are fun and relying on the system is just as exciting. But did you know that Siri is no longer depending on Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) as much as it did in the past?
AppleInsider explains that “Tests with Apple’s voice-driven personal assistant, Siri, have found that the service turns to Google for an answer in iOS 6 half as much as it did in iOS 5.”
It was only a matter of time before this happened, as there is no way the executives at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) want their popular smartphone to rely too heavily on results from Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG).
Here is a brief explanation from the same article:
When investment firm Piper Jaffray initially tested Siri in June, its list of common queries found that Google was responsible for about 60 percent of the data returned. Now, with iOS 6, Google is responsible for only 30 percent of the data.
According to analyst Gene Munster, the removal of Google Maps in iOS6 was the main reason for the change:
The biggest change in query resolution to Google was the removal of Google Maps in iOS 6, as 23% of queries resolved to Apple Maps. Yelp and Yahoo! also benefited slightly. Net-net we view this as a slight negative for consumers on Apple products as we view Apple Maps as an inferior product to Google Maps.
From a consumer perspective, one of the biggest complaints regarding Siri is inaccurate results. It appears that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been working to improve in this area:
The latest tests also found evidence of behind-the-scenes improvements to Siri, though the changes have been slight. In iOS 5, Siri understood 89 percent of queries spoke in a quiet environment, while that improved to 91 percent in iOS 6, while 76 percent of queries were answered correctly in iOS 5 and that improved to 77 percent with iOS 6.
In typical fashion, nobody expected Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) to sit back too long while Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) dominated this side of the smartphone competition. With this in mind, the company launched a Siri of its own – known as Google Now.
So, which company has the lead at the present? According to Munster, it is close:
It appears the two voice assistants are comparable to one another in terms of understanding the spoken query and returning the correct result. In our test, Siri correctly understood our queries 91% of the time in a quiet environment compared to Google Now at 88%. In terms of accuracy, we determined that Siri accurately answered understood queries 77% of the time compared to 75% for Google now.
In the months to come, it is safe to say that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) will be putting plenty of resources into its respective voice-driven applications.
Check back here for more updates on Siri Vs Now.
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