Google Assistant outperforms Amazon Alexa, even for online shopping
Google Assistant has outperformed Amazon Alexa, despite Amazon Alexa being more popular globally. In a test to understand the effectiveness of smart speakers, Google assistant had beat Alexa and other voice assistants like Apple Siri and Cortana.
According to The Street.com reports on Sunday, in the 2018 edition of 'Smart Speaker IQ Test' by a research-driven capital firm Loup Ventures, Google Assistant, which was tested on Home smart speaker managed to answer 87.9 per cent of the questions correctly, which was an up from 81.1 per cent in 2017.
On the other hand, Alexa, which was tested on Amazon Echo smart speaker saw an accuracy improvement of 72.5 per cent from 63.8 per cent, while Microsoft Cortana, which was tested on Harman Kardon's Invoke speaker had an improvement of 63.4 per cent from 56.4 per cent.
Interestingly, Alexa was not the leader in the shopping category -- despite Amazon heading the global e-commerce space -- as Google Home returned more correct answers when asked about product information.
"Google Assistant was the only assistant to properly understand all 800 of the questions, but the others were able to understand 99 per cent or more," said the research firm.
Apple Siri (tested on HomePod speaker), got 74.6 per cent of the questions right, up from about 52 per cent.
The common set of 800 questions were split into five categories - Local information, commerce, navigation, information in general and commands.
Of the five categories, Google Assistant came first on all, except for commands, where it finished second to Siri.
Google Assistant and Siri were well ahead of their peers in the local information and navigation categories.
Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) abilities have bolstered Assistant and so has integration with Google Search and its Knowledge Graph, noted the researchers.
Amazon and Google accounted for 70 per cent share of the global smart speaker shipments in the first quarter of 2018.
With 43.6 per cent market share, Amazon shipped an impressive four million smart speakers, said market research firm Strategy Analytics.
Google (26.5 per cent market share with 2.4 million sales) and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (7.6 per cent market share) consolidated their number two and three rankings.
Led by Amazon, the smart speaker's category in India grew 43 per cent in the second quarter of 2018, said an International Data Corporation (IDC).
Amazon with its Echo range of smart speakers, led the category with 59 per cent market share, closely followed by Google for the second position.
(With IANS inputs)
