Alexa, Siri and Cortana and many more are an example of how efficient Artificial Intelligence has become. Answering to the user’s question is one of the basic features of this personal assistance, but with technological advancement, these assistances are embedded with powerful search engines driven by AI. This makes any kind of information available in seconds after you ask for it.

The evolution of virtual assistants has been really swift and IT companies are continuously working on innovating their offerings. With so many choices available, it gets really difficult for a consumer to decide which one to go for. We will be discussing the following AI assistants:

• Alexa by Amazon

• Siri by Apple

• Cortana by Microsoft

Let’s move on to the details and see which one is better.

The voice recognition capability

When voice recognition was tested on these AI assistants, this is what was found. Siri voice recognition is great under ideal conditions but if you ask Siri to read out a news item for you then you have to be really loud to ask her to stop the news or turn off manually. Same goes for Alexa, the speakers need to be turned off for the audio to stop. Moreover, Alexa couldn’t interpret properly what is being asked for while Siri can easily identify questions. Cortana is a great disappointment when it comes to voice recognition.

Ease of Setting up the AI Assistant

All the AI assistants give an option to customize the settings and adaptive responses. How long does it take to start up with the assistant is evaluated here. Alexa and Siri require no such setup; all you need to do is sign in to start. It only takes around 45 seconds in the initial start which also includes the duration of starting up of the device.

Whereas Cortana needs a separate email account that will require a verification after login; only then you can access Cortana. You won’t be able to sign in with any other account or your phone number if you want to download it on your phone.

Accessibility

Let’s consider each AI assistant individually and see how many devices can these assistants operate on.

Cortana

Cortana is available on Windows. However, you can download it on iOS. Invoke speakers introduced by Harman Kardon work best for Cortana. Compatibility with other third-party speakers is not seen, which shows that it might lose in the race of innovation and development.

Alexa

You can easily access Alexa with the Amazon Echo line of speakers, Fire TV, and Fire tablet. Among all the AI assistants Alexa is accessible on a verity of devices. You can find a number of speakers of various sizes and some modern designs that are available with touch screens. All these devices are widely available at Amazon store even some third-party devices support Alexa, such as Altec Lansing Versa Smart Portable speakers, Ultimate Ears Megablast speakers, Sonos wireless speaker, and Garmin Speak plus Dash Camera

Siri

All Apple devices such as the desktops, tablets, smartwatches, laptops, and phones are compatible with Siri. Moreover, Apple has its very own speakers called HomePod which supports Siri. Talking about third-party devices, there is no such addition up till now, but Sonos claims that they will soon be introducing a software through which users can access Siri.

Who’s the best?

It is quite difficult to say which is the perfect AI assistant, as this technology is new and developers are working on making it better. Each one stands out in one or the other category. However, if you were choose one, then Siri would stand out from the rest.