There was virtually no competition from Google when Apple launched Siri alongside the iPhone 4S in 2011. Android had voice actions of a sort, but they were extremely limited and not easy to access on most phones. With the Google Now redesign of search in 2012, Google leveraged its mountain of data to offer an alternative to Siri in mobile voice recognition. Apple has made Siri smarter with every iteration of iOS, but Google has been rolling voice features out quickly through the search app and taken integration to a new level with the Moto X. How does Android voice search and Siri compare after this week's iOS 7 refresh?
Siri began mainly as an assistant app with a few search capabilities. While Apple has been beefing up search, it's still working on making Siri better at managing your device. You can now tell Siri you want to disable or enable a setting, like Bluetooth. If you tell Siri to turn on Airplane Mode, the system even warns you that it will stop working if you proceed. It's almost human sometimes.
Google's Android voice search is much more focused on gathering data from the web, but it has slowly encroached on Siri's "assistant" territory. The settings toggles are not yet available in Google voice search, although Samsung's S Voice does have this feature.
When it comes to sending messages, the Google experience is more stripped down, but also faster. Siri is designed to do everything through voice, so it asks you if you want to send the message. If you don't, it asks you what you want to do with it. It's conversational, which can be useful or tedious, depending on your perspective. Google voice search populates the fields based on your input, then you have to tap the screen to send.
It's a similar story with managing your calendar and appointments. Siri only needs to be told to add an appointment, then asks you for the relevant details until the event is created. Google voice search only goes so far as to set the day and time, but you have to tap through to the calendar app to enter the name and any other details before saving.
When it comes to pulling data from online, Google has a huge advantage. Its vast storehouse of search data makes the process faster, and the knowledge graph presents results in a clean interface. When Siri is unable to answer a query in a snappy manner, it reaches out to the web, which used to mean Google, but now Bing is the star of the show.
Of course, you can still tell Siri to "Google" something, however its default fallback is to pull web results from Bing. It's disguised in the Siri interface, so you might never notice. Apple has also added more Wikipedia integration, which acts like a knowledge graph card so long as you use the right commands.
When it comes to simply asking natural language questions, Google voice search still seems to have the edge. It can parse pages and find the relevant information, and it's more likely to get the task done quickly. Siri's requirement of reaching out to third-party services slows it down by a few seconds. However, it has better integration of Twitter data than Android does.
Siri still just seems more confused by natural language when it comes to web searches. Apple is mostly interested in automating the phone or tablet, not the web. Meanwhile, Google is pushing touchless control on the new Motorola devices, which is geared toward search. Both services have their strong points, but even with Siri's head start, Google voice search has caught up impressively, and even clearly surpassed Apple in a number of important areas.
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