Alexa, Siri or Google: Who’s the best conversationalist?

Digital assistants like Amazon’s Echo can listen to you. And they can talk back. But that doesn’t mean they can carry on a good conversation.

As the devices that run these assistants become more commonplace — 39 million Americans now own one, according to a recent study — Amazon and competitors like Apple and Google foresee a day when you can chat with their assistants like you would with a friend.

After consulting with the companies involved and a few artificial intelligence experts we created tests that show what they can and can’t handle. Don’t expect the assistants to replace conversations with friends anytime soon. But the experiments — even in the moments when the assistants screwed up — showed what these assistants could one day become in our lives.

If your roommate asked what you wanted from the market and you said “guacamole, chips, tortillas,” he would understand that as three separate things. But the Google and Amazon devices didn’t quite recognise the pause between items as a verbal comma.

Alexa grasped that we were continuing to add to the shopping list, even though we weren’t explicit about it. It held onto the context of the exchange and mapped our next request back to our list.

A digital assistant relies on many different technology systems, all working together on the device and inside a network of computer data centres that connect to the assistant over the internet.

When you say something, one system tries to recognise each word and convert it to text. Another system tries to understand the meaning of each word and how it relates to the others. A third system spits out new text that responds to what you’ve said. A fourth converts this response to digital speech.