Apple's Siri ties with Google Assistant for most-used voice assistant
A Microsoft study suggests that Apple's Siri is on par with Google Assistant for worldwide usage, despite the latter being available on a wider range of devices.
Both voice assistants ranked at 36 percent in a whitepaper based on two online surveys. The first ran from March to June 2018, considering over 2,000 responses in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and India. The second was U.S.-only, but tapped some 5,000 people in February 2019.
Amazon Alexa managed second place in the study at 25 percent, followed by 19 percent for Microsoft's Cortana. Few speakers support Cortana, but the assistant is built into anything with Windows 10.
The predominance of Siri and Google Assistant is due to their native presence on smartphones. Alexa is the commanding player in the world of smartspeakers, but has relatively little footprint on phones -- people typically have to install the Alexa app on their own.
Privacy is the overriding concern most people have with AI assistants, Microsoft noted. In overlapping figures, 52 percent of respondents said they felt their personal data was insecure, and 41 percent worried that speakers were actively listening and recording. 36 percent said they didn't want personal data being used, and 31 percent believed their information isn't being kept private.
Apple has held privacy as a key selling point of its devices, including the HomePod. The product managed just 1.6 percent of the global smartspeaker market in the December quarter however, likely held back by its pricetag. Until this month a single HomePod was $349 from Apple, and it's still $299 -- that compares against $49 entry points for Amazon and Google. A rumored low-cost HomePod model has yet to surface.
Both voice assistants ranked at 36 percent in a whitepaper based on two online surveys. The first ran from March to June 2018, considering over 2,000 responses in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and India. The second was U.S.-only, but tapped some 5,000 people in February 2019.
Amazon Alexa managed second place in the study at 25 percent, followed by 19 percent for Microsoft's Cortana. Few speakers support Cortana, but the assistant is built into anything with Windows 10.
The predominance of Siri and Google Assistant is due to their native presence on smartphones. Alexa is the commanding player in the world of smartspeakers, but has relatively little footprint on phones -- people typically have to install the Alexa app on their own.
Privacy is the overriding concern most people have with AI assistants, Microsoft noted. In overlapping figures, 52 percent of respondents said they felt their personal data was insecure, and 41 percent worried that speakers were actively listening and recording. 36 percent said they didn't want personal data being used, and 31 percent believed their information isn't being kept private.
Apple has held privacy as a key selling point of its devices, including the HomePod. The product managed just 1.6 percent of the global smartspeaker market in the December quarter however, likely held back by its pricetag. Until this month a single HomePod was $349 from Apple, and it's still $299 -- that compares against $49 entry points for Amazon and Google. A rumored low-cost HomePod model has yet to surface.
Comments
Not sure what Microsoft's intent was with the survey, and with Cortana so prevalent the result seem somewhat suspect to me anyway.
For Siri and Google Assistant to be tied for usage, a lot of people are talking to Siri on their Apple devices, and a lot of people with Android devices aren’t talking to Google. That pretty much has to mean that, despite the claims that Google Assistant is technically superior or more capable, a lot more of the people who have access to it don’t find it useful enough to bother. So why would that be? Is Google’s AI not actually that great in this context? Do people have security concerns and disable it?
On my iPhone, I tend to use it for more advanced stuff, like reading back messages when I’m in the car, directions, music identification, translation, discovering what restaurants or other businesses are nearest to me, figuring out tip percentages, and a bunch of other stuff (some of which I picked up from AI’s excellent video on all the different commands Siri can do).
For some people, it’s a great tip to take a second and compose your command in your head before speaking so you don’t “wander around” or pause confusingly when speaking to (any voice assistant), but for most people I find it works very well. I often teach older folks how to set reminders, alarms, and appointments in their calendar using only their voice, and within five minutes they are doing it themselves and thinking this is the greatest thing since Star Trek came on back in the sixties.
I’m actively trying to use Google Assistant less, but I have also found it handy for some specific queries Siri isn’t as good on, though Siri routinely improves when I try it for those sorts of queries. Specifically, Google Assistant is really good at knowing a business’s opening and closing **and holiday** hours. Siri has of late gotten smarter about opening/closing, but still occasionally defers to the website rather than giving me the correct answer. So not saying GA isn’t better in some ways, but saying that Siri handles a wide array of popular requests very well, based on everyday real-world usage.
Also, you can't equate usage with the capability of the assistant. There's no corollary that ties the two together. That's akin to saying Windows is better than MacOS because more people use it.
Basically all you can discern from the survey is digital assistants are in use and the each have strengths in different areas.
i have an iPad Pro 10.5 inch, the chip of which does not contain the neural engine. I do not have an iPhone. Can anyone who has the A12 series with neural engine please tell me if they have noticed improvement in pattern recognition i.e. in photos being more accurately classed etc. and, importantly to me, is Siri more accurate with the neural engine that advances machine learning? I had planned to keep my current IPP for several years (I love my headphone jack and use it every evening) but I may have to reconsider if Siri is improved. I use Siri constantly, and if the neural engine is required to get even more out of her and more accurate identification of my over 7000 photos I may have to reconsider an upgrade.
Lie to people enough and they become skeptics - go figure.
You can scientifically and mathematically explain both sides of an issue - it’s the question (or lack there of) that matters.
The real story here is 1.6%.
Said it from day 1 - HomePod will be a total flop in its hardcore ultra-locked-down to the max useless state - that misses all the marks.
Reminiscent of the hockey puck mouse... totally useless to 98.4% of the market.
”This report is based on the findings from two separate online consumer focused survey’s. The March – June 2018 survey was conducted by Microsoft Market Intelligence to gain a better understanding of the digital assistant usage and adoption . The Market Intelligence survey was conducted online with over 2,000 global responses representing the US, UK, CA, AU and IN. Building off of the findings from the Market Intelligence survey we used online research tool AskSuzy to engage with 5000 US consumers in February 2019 to gain a better understanding of the usage of how adoption of technology has has shifted and how adoption of shopping functionality has evolved .”
They also have industry analyst information sprinkled in here and there, like 25% of US households have a smart speaker with half of those owners having more than 1, or that there are 50m smart speakers sold in the USA.
The report reads like a “Cortana and voice is great and growing” gospel book. Ie, reads like the division trying to promote itself. It didn’t indicate how much overlap there was, like how much survey respondents used both Alexa and Siri, or Alexa and GA, or Cortana and GA, etc. There should only be a shallow trust in this results.
This does not mean 36% of Apple device users are using Siri. It means 36% of all people they surveyed are using Siri. (Note that their percentages add up to 117, which means some of their respondents are using more than one brand of digital assistant. This would be expected, as some iPhone and Android phone owners probably have Amazon speakers in the house, etc.)
So assuming their survey's respondents resemble something like the general population, because we know that Android has a much larger share of the market than Apple with regard to devices owned, this means that there is a larger pool of the survey's respondents who own Android devices, yet only the same number of respondents use GA as use Siri. That means that a much lower percentage of Android owners use GA as compared to Apple owners using Siri.
That then is what brought me to the questions about why a larger percentage of Apple device owners use Siri, even though all the online chatter likes to say that GA is a 'more capable' digital assistant.