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?
Image 5 of 7
BlackBerry's voice control system on the BlackBerry 10 OS is the new kid on this block.
Like Siri it can be used for things like sending text messages, placing calls or scheduling a meeting or reminder. It can also be used to take notes or to dictate other text.
Word recognition on the BlackBerry system is actually pretty accurate — most of the time it seems to understand what is being said if you speak clearly — but it can't understand natural language in quite the same way as Siri and Now. For example, if you say 'take a picture', the handset responds with 'do you want to search the internet for take a picture?' However, say 'open camera' and it can do that.
Like Siri, the BlackBerry system asks for confirmation of commands. I asked it to send an email to Ben Woods and it responded by asking which Ben Woods email address in the address book I would like to send it to, all achievable through voice commands.
It also has quite a granular level of control of the information being entered or edited, for example, when scheduling an appointment or writing an email it will allow you to select and edit each part of the message (time, title – for an appointment, or things like subject line, body, recipients for an email) without needing to touch the handset.
It did occasionally find it difficult to recognise confusable commands. Such as, instructing it to set a reminder that it was Ben Woods' birthday tomorrow ended up in a calendar entry saying 'Ben would birthday'. It's only a minor point, but worth keeping an eye on if you're sending messages to people that have similar sounding names.
Asking the BlackBerry Z10 where the nearest Nandos is resulted in the phone offering to search the web for the closest branch.
Where the BlackBerry falls hardest is the lack of a partnership with a service like Wolfram Alpha, as offered by Siri. Asking it any kind of mathematical addition or division simply resulted in it offering to search the web, despite understanding every word, rather than displaying the result.
However, the voice commands are pretty powerful overall. You can open any app on the phone or search for any phrase, contact, word or anything else all via search and it will understand what you are saying quite a lot of the time. And if social networking is your thing, you can update your status on Facebook or post a Tweet without using your hands.
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
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...