Compared to Google Assistant, Siri scored very poorly in a recent test

If you've had the pleasure of using Google Assistant on Android or iOS/iPadOS, Siri on iOS and iPadOS, and Alexa on the various platforms it supports, you probably don't need to be told that Google Assistant is the best of the trio. Siri-ously, Apple has a lot of hard work ahead of it if it wants its digital helper to be as intelligent and as helpful as Assistant is. The trio were recently put through the paces by AI training outfit Bespoken using an Amazon Echo Show 5 (Alexa), an Apple iPad mini (Siri), and a Google Nest Home Hub (Assistant).

According to Voicebot,ai, the questions were asked by Bespoken using a test robot and were labeled as complex or simple. Some questions were designed to try and trick the digital helpers since they had no correct answer-such as "name the first man on Mars." As you might have been able to guess, Google Assistant performed the best with Alexa second and Siri third.

Interestingly, the percentage of questions answered correctly by Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri were pretty much the same regardless of whether they were categorized as complex or simple. This suggests that incorrect answers were not caused by the failure of the digital helpers to understand the questions, but they simply did not know the correct answers. Simple questions were correctly answered by Google Assistant 76.57% of the time, Alexa 56.29% of the time, and by Siri 47.29% of the time. Google Assistant answered 70,18% of complex questions correctly with a 55.05% score for Alexa and a 41.32% score for Siri.

Apple has squandered the head start it had when it introduced Siri to the public with the unveiling of the iPhone 4s in October 2011. Alexa was released by Amazon in November 2014, and in May 2016, Google released Google Assistant.

Bespoken's Chief Evangelist Emerson Sklar commented on the results of the test and stated, "We have two major takeaways from this initial research. First, while Google Assistant outperformed Alexa and Siri in every category, all three have significant room for improvement. These results underscore the need for developers to thoroughly test, train, and optimize every app they build for these voice platforms."

Sklar added that "second, this process was completely automated, and we plan to continue to run these tests as well as introduce new benchmarks. This sort of automation enables not just point-in-time measurement but also continuous optimization and improvement. We know Google, Amazon, and Apple all embrace this, and we encourage others to as well."

Bespoken used its new Test Robot which copies human speech to see how apps like Assistant, Siri and Alexa respond. Talking about the robot, which was introduced early last month, Sklar stated that "Our tools are already used by thousands of developers to reliably and repeatably automate interaction with any voice platform – at a small fraction of the cost of manual testing and without ever actually talking to a device – and this capability makes it easy for us to gain real-time, unbiased, and statistically-significant data about each platform's core behavior. The actionable insight our tests generate makes it easy to fix app defects and optimize the conversational models themselves to increase successful understanding to greater than 95%."

You might have noticed the absence of Microsoft's Cortana from this test. Early last month, the software giant killed off the iOS and Android mobile apps for Cortana.

So how can Siri move out of the basement and breathe that lofty Penthouse air where Google Assistant resides? First of all, too many responses made by Siri force users to tap a link to get an answer, even if a question is about an Apple device.

For example, ask Siri for the release date of Apple Watch and you are sent a trio of links to tap. Ask the Google Assistant app on iOS the exact same question and underneath an image of the device you are told that "Pre-orders for the Apple Watch began on April 10, 2015, with the official release on April 24." The conclusion is that Google knows more about the history of Apple devices than Apple knows itself.

But it really seems that Google Assistant knows more about anything than Siri does.