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I was looking for a fair comparison between Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa and I stumbled across this [0]. I find it interesting because it seems you would need a

by ccozan 11y ago

I was looking for a fair comparison between Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa and I stumbled across this [0]. I find it interesting because it seems you would need all of them to answer all your questions. Do you have also some personal experince comparing with Now , Siri or Cortana? What went really bad or amazed in terms of speech recognition and speech comprehension? [0] http://www.cio.com/article/2953989/software-productivity/10-questions-for-cortana-siri-amazon-echo-and-google-now.html http://www.cio.com/article/2953989/software-productivity/10-...

gervase 11y ago
I can't speak for Cortana, but I have personal experience with Siri, Now, and Alexa. In terms of the actions that I do day-to-day (I would never ask for a dirty joke, for example, but I ask for the weather daily), I would rank them Now, Alexa, and distant third, Siri. There are two axes that I care about - how many useful commands are available, and how well they can understand me. Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. Alexa also has a very wide range of behaviors (especially with the Skills), but I do occasionally run into things I feel like it should do that it doesn't (yet). To be fair, I also use her the most, so it could be that I push her further than the others. The voice recognition is quite good; I would say it misunderstands me less than 5 times in 100. Siri is by far the worst. Her abilities are limited, but worse, she has a tendency to funnel commands that she can't do into things she can. For example, asking for the hours of a restaurant will instead show you a Bing search (!) for the restaurant's name, sans hours. This is not useful. It would be better to just inform me that she can't do that yet, file that in a log at Apple, and then add that behavior some time down the road. She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. > She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries. And this is pretty much a huge issue for this market. Entry requires having already spent several billions on voice tech. You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did. Maybe someday we can have laws that require all neural networks trained with data from others to be in the public domain, even if the people providing training data agreed to the data being used for training. Then we could compete on other things than "understands voice".
  - lgas 11y ago
    Well, until then, Google's speech recognition API is available (https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/) so it seems like it should be possible to at least compete at Google levels of SR without even having to understand what training data is.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      And how exactly am I supposed to do that without transferring userdata to a third party (like Google)? Privacy laws – which I personally like – prevent using that.
  - shostack 11y ago
    "You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did." Didn't they use Google Voice as well?
    - manaus10 11y ago
      I hope not. That would be very creepy

by ccozan 11y ago

gervase 11y ago

I can't speak for Cortana, but I have personal experience with Siri, Now, and Alexa. In terms of the actions that I do day-to-day (I would never ask for a dirty joke, for example, but I ask for the weather daily), I would rank them Now, Alexa, and distant third, Siri. There are two axes that I care about - how many useful commands are available, and how well they can understand me. Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. Alexa also has a very wide range of behaviors (especially with the Skills), but I do occasionally run into things I feel like it should do that it doesn't (yet). To be fair, I also use her the most, so it could be that I push her further than the others. The voice recognition is quite good; I would say it misunderstands me less than 5 times in 100. Siri is by far the worst. Her abilities are limited, but worse, she has a tendency to funnel commands that she can't do into things she can. For example, asking for the hours of a restaurant will instead show you a Bing search (!) for the restaurant's name, sans hours. This is not useful. It would be better to just inform me that she can't do that yet, file that in a log at Apple, and then add that behavior some time down the road. She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries.

kuschku 11y ago
> Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. > She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries. And this is pretty much a huge issue for this market. Entry requires having already spent several billions on voice tech. You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did. Maybe someday we can have laws that require all neural networks trained with data from others to be in the public domain, even if the people providing training data agreed to the data being used for training. Then we could compete on other things than "understands voice".
- lgas 11y ago
  Well, until then, Google's speech recognition API is available (https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/) so it seems like it should be possible to at least compete at Google levels of SR without even having to understand what training data is.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    And how exactly am I supposed to do that without transferring userdata to a third party (like Google)? Privacy laws – which I personally like – prevent using that.
- shostack 11y ago
  "You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did." Didn't they use Google Voice as well?
  - manaus10 11y ago
    I hope not. That would be very creepy