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Smartphone makers are looking to voice control and personal assistants to make their hardware stand-out. But are all voice control systems created equally?
Everyone has heard of Siri, the personal digital assistant hidden away inside your iPhone but there's more than just Siri on the market. With hardware features of smartphones matching each other step-for-step, manufacturers are increasingly looking towards bespoke services and features, such as voice control, as key differentiators.
While third-party developers were already working on voice control apps for handsets it was only since the introduction of Siri (itself a third-party app available on the App Store until Apple bought the company in 2010) that rivals really started to put more emphasis on their own equivalents.
However, voice control is no mean feat, so how does the competition measure up to Siri, the current queen of the crop?
In order to put each system through its basic paces, I tested out an iPad 3, Samsung Galaxy Note II, Nokia Lumia 920 and a Sony Xperia T running Android Jelly Bean.
All voice recognition tests were done indoors in a mostly quiet environment, which makes a difference. Try replicating these on the streets and you'll likely get a worse word recognition rate, and more erroneous actions performed on your behalf. You might also look a bit strange walking down the street shouting at your phone telling it to take you to the nearest Nandos.
Caption by: Ben Woods
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