Siri Beat Amazon Alexa in This Digital Assistant Intelligence Test

Siri Iphone Credit: Wachiwit / Shutterstock
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Siri may lag behind other digital assistants in many areas, but the results of a new test suggest that that may not be the case for much longer.

Apple’s digital assistant answered 83 percent of questions correctly in a recent test of digital assistants on smartphones carried out by Loup Ventures’ Gene Munster.

The questions were spread across five categories, including local, commerce, navigation, information and command – and each of the digital assistants were asked the same questions.

  • Siri fared better than Alexa in the command, navigation and local categories.
  • Siri beat both Alexa and Google assistant in the command category.

Munster asked each assistant a total of 800 questions during the test. Siri beat out Alexa (79 percent) in accuracy across several categories, but still trailed behind Google Assistant (92 percent).

Loup Ventures actually runs the same test annually. And compared to last year, Siri saw some improvement. In last year’s test, the Apple assistant answered 79 percent of questions correctly.

It’s worth noting, of course, that Alexa and Google Assistant both saw improvement, too. In particular, Alexa jumped from 61 percent to 79 percent compared to last year.

Caveats

While Siri is undoubtedly improving, it’s important to keep in mind that this was a smartphone-based test of digital assistants. Because of that, it may not have been the fairest to Amazon’s Alexa.

Google Assistant and Siri are both tightly integrated with their respective smartphone operating systems. Alexa, by contrast, is more of a smart speaker assistant.

Still, the test results indicate that Apple’s continuing development of Siri may be paying off. Munster, for his part, also predicts that Apple could further improve Siri by extending its feature set.

Siri Improvement

Over the past few years, Apple has been making moves to steadily improve the intelligence and accuracy of Siri. Back in 2018, the Cupertino tech giant went on an engineer hiring spree to improve the digital assistant. Since then, the company has made some high-profile hires.

There are also some rumors that Apple could release a “SiriOS” platform at WWDC next year. While it’s not clear what a Siri operating system could entail, voice technology experts think it could allow for more third-party skills development and expanded capabilities.

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