Voice control showdown: Siri vs Google Now, S Voice, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 8
Summary: Smartphone makers are looking to voice control and personal assistants to make their hardware stand-out. But are all voice control systems created equally?
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Siri, like it or not, popularised voice control and is seen by many as the leading system on smartphones today.
What Siri excels at, particularly in comparison to some of the other systems in this test, is understanding natural language.
For example, Say "I want to take a picture" and Siri will open the camera app or you can just say "open camera".
It's also really good at recognising what you're saying and giving you pointers along the way if you're new to the phone. For example, you can send email using Siri but if you haven't set up your account first it will tell you to do that, rather than just return an error.
The range of functionality with Siri is quite broad but dependent upon the key partnerships Apple has put in place, so can vary depending on what you are trying to do. It's tied into most of the core apps in iOS so making or changing a calendar entry, sending a text, or getting information about a particular event is a breeze.
However, at points the information is very superficial, for example, asking when the next Formula One race would take place returned the correct answer immediately but when I asked where it was, Siri just repeated the date. Similarly, when I asked when the last race of 2013 would be, Siri said it could not get information about Formula One and offered to search the internet instead.
One of the strengths of Siri is the tie-in with Wolfram Alpha giving great results for computational answers. Ask Siri a maths question and the answer will pop straight up but ask it to switch on Bluetooth and it can't help you out.
When I asked Siri to "take me to London Bridge" it replied by popping up information about London Bridge, as well as saying how far away it was.
Siri's biggest weakness (in the UK at least) for me is the local information. Ask where the nearest Nandos is and it says "I don't know what that is" and offers to search the web.
You can also use Siri for things like taking notes, playing music or videos, checking the weather or listening to notifications.
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Talkback
Assumptions...
Fine
You mean those adds that make
Siri and iPhone/iPad are just toys for ....
If an iPhone can simultaneously control 32 different external devices running each a different application with 1 ms precision, and still allow me to use the device as a smartphone, then we are cool. Android can't do that off the shelf, but I have modified it to so for my personal use. Can't do that with an iPhone.
Until I will only consider it as a toy for shallow people that don't know any better.
I've heard of it because of ZDnet!
Seen or heard of it - nope.
Your or An
I have an iphone 4
Then apple bought the company called Siri and suddenly the app was gone.
Then apple needed a bullet point feature spec list sheet item to sell the 4s because it wasn't actually better than the iphone 4 in any way.
So siri came back as an iphone 4s exclusive because apple told me that the iphone 4 wasn't powerful enough to run siri. Refer to the first sentence in my post to see apple's lie.
Apple Lie
then why did they pull it? (nt)
Worked better
correctly put.
I think such comparisons shall bring in pertinent points like what all categories an app is capable to attend of... like... due to ongoing dispute with the level of integration of voice assistants, some functionality differences are inherent among apps... that should be highlighted first... before comparison... In fact, compare them on differences, then come about what similar they can do.... and who well in compared to each other...
I may appear a little vague over here.... but a person with deep understanding about the task at hand ... will understand ... so is the work and duty of a blogger/reporter... to present it in an objective way so that it generates genuine interest rather than getting a feeling that we wasted time to listen to a fan boy...
What... are you... talking... about...
He's.... using....
Windows Phone
You should post your test
Here is what I like, and don't like, about WP8 voice
With WP8, when a text comes in, my phone asks me if I want it read to me. I don't have to press anything, never have to take my eyes off the road or my hands off the wheel. After the text has been read, WP8 asks me if I want to respond. Again, no button pressing. If I answer yes, I can dictate a message and send it. The entire conversation is very natural and at no point do I look at the screen or press a button or tap a screen of any kind.
If the other platforms do that as well, kudos. My iphone 4 certainly could not do that.
What I don't like: dictation is lacking some much needed control. While it handles English extremely well, there is no way of correcting a single word or spelling out a proper noun. So everything up to and after dictation is fantastic on WP8. Dictation can be extremely frustrating if any mistakes are made. Your only 2 choices are to try again or just hope that the person on the other end can sound it out and figure it out.
Also, failed to play to its strengths
I don't believe any of the other OSes can do those things.
So, WP is (as usual) unique in it's approach. In some ways, much much better, and in other ways severely lacking...like the OS itself.
And I cannot compare to Android, but I will contest that WP's voice recognition is much more accurate than Siri. I would bet Android's is better still, since Google have been doing this stuff for a long time.
Yes, this could be a strong feature
So I've played around with it to control music but not often. What would be great is if I could use voice to control a navigation app without once having to look at or tap the screen. I haven't found a fully voice controlled navigation app though. Do you know of one?
Re: Strong Feature...