Google Now is the best voice assistant, at least when it comes to answering questions that required direct answers.
A new case study, albeit non-scientific, conducted by SEO agency Stone Temple Consulting shows Google's smart digital assistant smashes Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana in several rounds of testing. The three voice assistants were asked 3,086 questions specifically chosen because they were likely to open a knowledge box on top of the conventional search results. Most of the questions were looking for factual answers, such as "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" or "Why is the sky blue?" but the researchers threw in the occasional opinion question such as "What is love?" or "What does the fox say?"
Eric Enge, founder and CEO of Stone Temple, emphasizes that the comparison was not done to find out which is the best personal digital assistant among the three. The study left out things such as, sending messages, getting driving directions, setting calendar appointments and other things users tell their digital assistants to do.
"This was a straight up knowledge box comparison, not a personal assistant comparison," says Enge. "For purposes of this study, a 'knowledge box' or 'knowledge panel' is defined as content in the search results that attempts to directly answer a question asked in a search query."
The results showed Google Now gave more enhanced results 58 percent of the time, while Siri had 29 percent and Cortana trailed behind with 20 percent. For instance, when asked the question "What is the tallest mountain the world?" both Siri and Cortana simply answered "Mount Everest." Google Now, on the other hand, gave Mount Everest and related details such as the height of the mountain and other tall mountains nearing that height.
When it comes to giving definitive answers, Google Now bested the other two by giving the most direct answers 88 percent of the time. Siri had 53 percent and Cortana, again, comes in last with 40 percent.
The results are not surprising given how far ahead Google is with its search engine. Siri pulls information from knowledge-based search engine Wolfram Alpha, which at one time was touted to be a Google killer, and also from Yahoo, Bing and Wikipedia. Naturally, Cortana uses Bing as well as Wikipedia, Freebase, the New York Times and other websites.
Google Now was also shown to provide as many as 25 percent of its answers without attribution. Typically, these are well-established, fact-based answers to questions like "Who is the first president of the United States?" Google Now is also more likely to provide complete step-by-step instructions in its answers to questions such as "How do you make French toast?" 21 percent of the time, which could pose traffic concern to websites who publish the answers to these questions.
