Google Assistant beats Amazon Alexa, even for online shopping

SAN FRANCISCO: Despite Amazon Alexa being more popular globally, Google Assistant has outperformed her -- and other voice assistants like Apple Siri -- in a test meant to understand the effectiveness of smart speakers. In the 2018 edition of "Smart Speaker IQ Test" by research-driven venture capital 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, The Street.com reported on Sunday. 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. 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.