AI assistants have become a large part of the smartphone and PC experience over the last couple of years, and the ever increasing competition in this space has led to a lot of improvements across the board as well. In this showdown, we pit five of the most popular AI assistants – Google Assistant, Siri, Bixby, Amazon Alexa, and Cortana – against each other to find out which one is the best!
All five of these assistants have a lot in common to start with and feature a lot of the some functionality and capabilities. You can usually access them with a press of a button, most of them are built into their various operating systems, they can all perform and access web searches, and they all have base apps or dedicated home screen pages to show additional information like the weather, news, reminders, and more. The basic experience is undoubtedly very similar when comparing the five assistants.
#1 The Google Assistant is exceptional at context, which is one of the drawbacks of most other personal assistant apps. With other assistants, you have to get the command just right in order to get the task completed, but the Google Assistant is very good at figuring out what you need even if you ask it to do the same thing in entirely different ways.
However, it is incredibly disappointing to see that all the fun features are exclusively saved for Google Home, like hailing an Uber, casting video, ordering a pizza, and more. While these features will no doubt come to phones eventually, for now Home is where it’s at. The Google Assistant is definitely the best all-around pick, though, even if we have to wait for the extra features to make their way to other Google devices.
#2 Amazon Alexa is probably the most customizable assistant of the lot. It is quite basic out of the box, but you can install additional “skills” that dramatically increase its functionality. I had to install numerous skills over the course of making the video, and most of them work really well. It’s up to you how much skills-adding you want to do to get the assistant you want.
Additionally, Alexa excels at gathering information over conversation in order to complete a task, as you saw while I was ordering a pizza. As far as pure functionality is concerned, Alexa can do more than all of the other AI Assistants, and Alexa-enabled devices work incredibly well with one another. The only disappointment here is that there aren’t a lot of devices out there that run Alexa.
#3 Siri also performed surprisingly well during every round of this text. Apple has been doing a great job of keeping Siri competitive with everybody else, and Siri definitely feels like a solid option. Of course, Siri is the natural choice for anyone in Apple’s ecosystem, and few folks would switch from Android simply for Siri. The most impressive part however is its backwards compatibility.
As long as your device can run one of the newer versions of iOS that feature Siri support, you are good to go. This test was performed on a first gen. iPad Air, and I know that the experience was no different than it would have been on the latest iPhone. Apple deserves a lot of credit for providing a consistent feel and feature set across both older and newer devices. Siri may not be the best choice, but it is a safe choice, especially if you are stuck on an older Apple device that can still receive OS updates.
#4 Cortana’s biggest strength lies in the fact that it is available everywhere, including iOS, Android, Windows 10, and even the Xbox One. It is available on more devices than every other personal assistant and it’s not even a close competition in this regard. However, it is quickly falling behind when it comes to third-party integration and more advanced tasks. Cortana is definitely not lacking in potential, but Microsoft really needs to step up their game a lot in order to be a driving force in this space.
#5 Bixby did a surprisingly good job during some of our testing, and where it excels the most is in feeling like an actual personal assistant. When it does something, Bixby has the ability to emulate screen taps like an actual person, allowing it to interact with on-screen elements better than any other assistant.
Bixby is unrivaled when it comes to boring, mundane tasks like rotating images in your gallery, downloading apps, erasing your browser history, and a lot more. It’s really too bad that Bixby will be available with only a handful of devices and that its home automation features are stuck behind a $50 Samsung hub. It still needs a lot of work though, especially with its tertiary features like Bixby Vision. Overall, it is definitely better than Cortana, and at least as good as Siri.