ALSO CONSIDER…
THE OTHER INFAMOUS DIGITAL ASSISTANTS
SAMSUNG BIXBY THE GALAXY’S GOT A NEW VOICE. Free | www.samsung.com/au/ apps/bixby
Since Samsung’s smartphone assistant is not actually available in Australia, this review is in here more for its notoriety than the software’s merit. It’s also a bit of an odd inclusion since Samsung’s Senior Director of Services, Quam Erogbogbo, has taken pains to highlight the fact that Bixby is not a smartphone assistant. Instead, the voice activated helper has been crafted to work in conjunction with Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. It avoids stepping on Google’s toes by only searching for things locally on your phone and adds compatibility for the smartphone settings adjustment tasks that the Google Assistant steers clear of.
MICROSOFT CORTANA WHY NOT COURT ANOTHER DIGITAL ASSISTANT. Free | www.microsoft.com
Microsoft may have ended support for WP 8.1, but Windows 10 for Phones is alive and... well, it’s alive, which means so is its digital assistant Cortana. We thoroughly interrogated Microsoft’s digital assistant a couple years back and, surprisingly, the only thing wrong with Cortana is that it was made for Windows Phone. At the time, it was better than Siri in terms of comprehension (Siri has since caught up), but it was also a standout personal assistant integrating nicely with OneNote, Outlook calendar, Maps (formerly Here Maps) and Microsoft’s other baked-in software.
AMAZON ALEXA THIS AMAZON IS RATHER COMPACT. Free | alexa.amazon.com
Like Bixby, we’re still waiting on this one to launch Down Under, but reports of the Amazon Alexa app for iOS and Huawei’s Android-based Mate 9, are good. Much like the also unreleased Echo smart speaker, the Alexa app is said to connect to your home’s smart devices and a range of third-party apps, allowing you to control them using your voice. Amazon has kept its focus indoors skipping voice commands for directions, sending text messages, making calls and opening apps. It also currently misses out on the full range of connectivity and commands seen on the Echo, only being able to play music through Amazon Music and missing obvious features like reminder and alarm scheduling.