While the headlines may make it seem that Siri has been unseated by Cortana and Google Now, a new study concludes that users are happier with Apple's digital assistant. And apparently, that satisfaction wasn't just a product of fans falling for Apple's charm.
Experts Exchange pitted the three digital assistants against each other and concluded that Siri was more accurate and her answers were more efficient than Google Now and Cortana.
"Our objective was to explore the various ways Siri outperformed the competition and to give consumers an expectation for their own virtual assistants' performances," says Experts Exchange.
Experts Exchanged asked survey participants to chuck seven questions at one of the three virtual assistants and the researchers examined each of their response. They asked the digital assistant things like 'When does Kung Fu Panda 3 come out?' and 'Where can I buy tires for my car?'
As for criteria, the researchers look to see how well the virtual assistants performed and the degree of user satisfaction. They also looked to see if the contestants did more than a mere web search, asked follow-up questions, returned the wrong answers and completely annoyed their users.
"With a sweeping victory across the accuracy and satisfaction categories, Siri was the clear winner in terms of responding to commands," Experts Exchange says. "Google Now was a mixed bag in its second-place victory, with Cortana receiving higher ratings in a few categories."
Ultimately, Siri was given an accuracy rating of 82 percent. Google Now was rated at 68 percent and Cortana at 60 percent.
The study also looked at geography, finding the Siri lovers in the western U.S. Lovers of Cortana and Google Now were concentrated in the eastern half of the country.
They also looked at gender. Cortana and Google Now tend to ask women more follow-up questions, while Siri was more prone to follow-up with men than women.
"The survey results are pretty much unanimous: Siri is the favorite virtual assistant," Experts Exchange says. "When Apple introduced Siri in 2011, her AI capabilities seemed like something from the future. However, her ability to compete a variety of commands with accuracy has led her to receive the highest rankings from our survey respondents."
