Top Rated Digital Assistants
Never forget another meeting, appointment or email again.
While the uses for AI are evolving and expanding every day, one of the more practical and widespread applications of the mobile era is the digital assistant. While they are far from perfect, digital assistants can help us complete mundane tasks and provide helpful reminders for the things we commonly forget. This leads us to ask, which digital assistant is the best?
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However, that is not to say that all digital assistants are created equal. The fact so many digital assistants are on the market is a reflection that most major tech companies are trying to ascertain how they can master computer speech recognition. More importantly they are scrabbling to integrate this into the user experience seamlessly. It’s not an easy task, but the first to make this kind of speech recognition functional and workable for mass usership is likely to benefit significantly from the innovation.
However, so far, this has been an elusive quest. As The Verge notes “Talking to our technology is considered one of the next big leaps in computing. When software has the ability to understand what we’re saying and how we’re saying it, it’ll be able to parse questions and supply answers, perform tasks on our behalf, and transform how we interact with devices. So far that vision hasn’t quite arrived
Despite the fact that mastery hasn’t quite happened yet, there are still plenty of options on the market. Here is a list of the most prominent digital assistants and the merits of each.
Siri
Known to iPhone users, Siri’s defining feature is that it aims to recognize complete sentences, not just keywords. This is a hard undertaking for a computer and it isn’t always accurate. With Apple’s most recent update to iOS 10, users saw a raft of new features including the ability to control and send messages on more third party apps like Pinterest and LinkedIn and the ability to hail rides via Uber or Lyft without opening those apps themselves. Siri also expanded just beyond the mobile experience to the desktop experience, giving users an array of new opportunities to summon Siri’s help.
Cortana
Cortana is used on phones that utilize a Windows operating system. It more or less functions as the search option of Windows, as you can both talk and text input to Cortana. Text entry is meant to be intelligent, so that Cortana can guess what it is you’re about to ask. Critics say that while Cortana is the most flexible of digital assistants—as it works across the Windows operating system—it is also the most hit and miss. As one reviewer said, “When it works, it feels like it’s the best of the bunch – but it fails more frequently than Siri or Google”
Hound
Hound is a stand-alone app that can be downloaded onto iOS and Android phones. The fact that it’s an app means you have to open it separately—i.e. it’s not seamlessly integrated into the phone experience—which can be a downside. But a reviewer for The Verge said that “it is without a doubt the smartest and fastest voice-based assistant I’ve ever seen.” Users also love it for its speed and understanding of speech in context.
Google Assistant
Google Assistant is the newest iteration of Google Now and the “sum of the company’s work in AI and machine learning,” as TechCrunch put it. It’s designed to serve as the heart of Google’s new smartphone, called the Pixel, but it doesn’t offer the same level of third party integration with apps that Siri does possibly because this is the first iteration of the service. Overall though, one reviewer noted that “Google’s Assistant also seems to have a better, more generally enjoyable sense of humor, too, when compared to other virtualized companions.”