In the Annual Digital Assistant IQ Test conducted by the research firm Loup Ventures, Google Assistant managed to outperform other virtual assistants in the number of questions understood and answered correctly. The study compared the performance of four smartphone-based digital assistants, namely the Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, and the researchers asked a set of 800 questions from five different categories, which are local, navigation, commerce, information, and command. The researchers then assessed if the digital assistant understood the question and if it delivered the correct answer or executed the correct command.
Even though there is very little difference between the digital assistants, the Google Assistant performed the best in terms of the number of questions understood. The search giant’s offering comprehended all of the questions asked by the researchers, while Siri understood 99-percent of the queries. Cortana and Alexa, on the other hand, understood 98-percent of questions. Google Assistant also leads in terms of the number of questions correctly answered. The search giant’s offering correctly responded to more than 85-percent of the questions, which is seven percent higher than the next best-performing digital assistant, Siri. Google Assistant also outperformed the four digital assistants in almost all question categories except for command, in which Siri commands a lead. An interesting finding in this study is the Google Assistant’s substantial lead in the commerce category. Researchers noted that many of their questions in the commerce category focused on researching a certain product. However, Alexa, the digital assistant developed by the retail giant Amazon, presented answers that did not provide sufficient information about an item. Both Siri and Google Assistant recorded more than 10-percent improvement in the number of questions correctly answered, while Cortana only improved by three percentage points.
This is not the only recent study that showed that the Google Assistant is the most intelligent digital assistant available. A study that was published in late 2017 shows that the Google Assistant has a comparable IQ to a six-year-old child, and it outperforms the next best-performing AI assistant, duer, by ten absolute IQ points. The researchers expect that improvements made to the digital assistants will allow these programs to control more functions in the near future.
