It’s hardly news that Siri is the dumbest of the voice-activated digital assistants when it comes to providing basic information or answering questions. Apple’s assistant regularly comes in dead last in comparisons with Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. Everyone knows Siri is dumb, but the steady drumbeat of “Siri is the dumbest” can deafen listeners to just how bad Siri really is. Siri is beyond dumb, it’s an embarrassment.
Stone Temple put the question-answering abilities of Alexa, the Assistant, Cortana and Siri to a rigorous test made up of 4,492 questions. An answer was considered “fully and completely” correct if it gave the user “100% of the information that they asked for in the question, without requiring further thought or research.” In a surprise to no one, Siri came in last again.
None of the digital assistants did very well on the test. Google’s smartphone Assistant was the best of the lot answering 74.6% of the questions correctly. Cortana and Google’s Home Assistant followed with 59.5% and 58% respectively. Alexa fell further behind at 44.3% correct. And then came Siri which only gave correct answers to 32.7% of the questions. Siri couldn’t answer even a third of the questions asked, an abysmal level of performance. Alexa performed 36% better, Google's Home Assistant 77%, Cortana 82% and Google's smartphone Assistant 146%. (Calculations based on raw data provided by Stone Temple.)
The story gets worse when you dig further. Stone Temple reported the percentage of questions each digital assistant tried to answer. Siri made an attempt at answering only 40.2% of the questions. In other words, Siri didn't even try to answer a question 59.8% of the time. It was the only digital assistant that tried to answer less than half the questions. In comparison, Google’s smartphone Assistant tried to answer 77.2% of the questions.
Not only did Siri try to answer far fewer questions than any of the others, it had the lowest percentage of correct answers for the questions it attempted. Siri got 80% of the questions it attempted correct. Google’s smartphone Assistant got 95.2% of the questions it answered correct.
Siri’s poor performance looks even worse when you take into account how long each of the digital assistants has been on the market. Siri first appeared as a third-party app on iPhones in 2010. Apple bought it and launched it as part of iOS in 2011. Cortana and Alexa launched in 2014. Google’s Assistant showed up in 2016. Siri had a huge head start. It’s been around almost twice as long as Cortana and Alexa, and more than three times as long as Google’s Assistant. And yet it’s question answering ability falls far behind the others.
When you combine Siri’s awful performance with the time Apple’s had to make their digital assistant better, it’s obvious that Siri is an epic fail. Last month, Google’s former head of AI and search, John Giannandrea, left the company to join Apple with the goal of improving Siri. Siri is so bad that making it better shouldn’t be difficult. Whether Giannandrea can bring Siri up to par with even the worst of the other digital assistants remains to be seen. I hope he succeeds because right now Siri is an embarrassment.
If you're interested in voice-activated digital assistants, here are some other articles you might enjoy.
- Dumb And Dumber: Comparing Alexa, Siri, Cortana And The Google Assistant
- Amazon's Alexa Hacked To Surreptitiously Record Everything It Hears
- Google's Assistant Can Now Launch Multi-Command Routines With A Simple Phrase
- The Homepod Is A Prime Example Of One Of Apple's Core Problems
- Google, Apple And The Move From A Hardware To An AI-Oriented World
- Report Claims That 16% Of Adults In The US Own Amazon's Echo Or Google's Home
