Google Assistant wins AI IQ test; Siri beats Alexa and Cortana

Following up on February's revealing comparison of smart speaker AI assistants, Loup Ventures today published its "annual digital assistant IQ test," tracking the performance of the four major AI assistants on smartphones. The firm suggested that Google's Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana have all improved over the past year, but surprisingly claimed a big improvement in Siri, while saying that Cortana fell well behind Amazon's Alexa. Loup used the same set of 800 questions for each digital assistant, and spread them across five categories: local, commerce, navigation, information, and command. To better reflect the capabilities of modern assistants, this year's questions were modified from ones used in a similar April 2017 test, somewhat muddying direct year-to-year comparisons. Overall, the clear winner of the test was Google's Assistant, which correctly understood 100 percent of questions, and had the most correct answers at 85.5 percent.