Google’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning abilities have bolstered Assistant and so has integration with Google Search and its Knowledge Graph, said Loup Ventures’ study.
For the second year in a row, Google Assistant has outperformed her rivals, including Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, in a test meant to understand the effectiveness of smart speaker voice assistants.
In the 2018 edition of “Smart Speaker IQ Test” conducted by research firm Loup Ventures, Google Assistant (tested on Home smart speaker) managed to answer 87.9 per cent of the questions correctly — up from 81.1 per cent in 2017, as reported by The Street.com.
For the study, the firm asked smart speakers powered by Google Assistant, Siri, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana a common set of 800 questions.
Siri (tested on HomePod speaker) got 74.6% of the questions right, up from about 52% in February, when the HomePod first became available.
Alexa (tested on Amazon Echo smart speaker) saw its accuracy improve to 72.5 per cent from 63.8 per cent and Microsoft Cortana (tested on Harman Kardon’s Invoke speaker) improved to 63.4 per cent from 56.4 per cent.
According to the research firm, Google Assistant was the only assistant to properly understand all 800 of the questions. The others were able to understand 99 per cent or more.
Google Assistant tops in four categories
This time, the questions were split into five categories – Local information, commerce, navigation, information in general and commands (for example, alarms or reminders).
Google Assistant topped in four categories, with Siri beating it in commands category.
Interestingly, Google was well ahead of all rivals in the commerce category, where it had an 86% accuracy rate to Siri’s 56%, Alexa’s 52% and Cortana’s 31%.
Meanwhile, Google Assistant and Siri left their peers far behind in the local information and navigation categories. Google Assistant and Alexa were well ahead in the broader information category.
What’s driving Google Assistant ahead
Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) abilities have bolstered Assistant and so has integration with Google Search and its Knowledge Graph, Loup’s study noted.
It may be noted here that Google Assistant and Siri were the toppers in Loup’s July test of voice assistants running on smartphones. In that test, Google Assistant and Siri accurately fielded 85.5% and 78.5% of questions, respectively, while Alexa and Cortana did so for 61.4% and 52.4%.
 managed to answer 87.9% of the questions correctly -- up from 81.1% in 2017 - in the Loup Ventures' test.){kind=link}