BATTLE OF THE BRAINS

We asked Google, Alexa and Siri 150 questions to see who’s smartest

OK Google, we get it. You are smarter than the other assistants.

This has been the subtext of recent Google I/O developer conferences. The latest edition kicked off Tuesday in Mountain View, Calif., where the Internet giant showed off how its Assistant, available on phones and its smart speaker Google Home line, was getting more adept at mimicking human conversation.

Google has a long way to catch up when it comes to the share of smart home devices. Amazon has Alexa in some 12,000 connected devices, compared with 5,000 for Google and just 194 for Apple’s Siri, says Voicebot.ai, a website that focuses on voice computing.

But in smarts, Google topped not just our informal survey but many recent ones, including surveys from online marketing firm Stone Temple and investment company Loup Ventures.

We asked the same 150 questions to the Google Assistant on Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa via the Echo speaker and Apple’s Siri on the iPhone. Google answered correctly 80% of the time, compared with 78% for Amazon and 55% for Siri.

If Google and Amazon gave us a complete, audio answer to the question, that counted as a successful response. When an assistant said it wasn’t set up to respond, or didn’t know, that counted as a fail.

And when Siri responded with a “Here’s what I found on the Web,” and a link to look it up ourselves, that also counted as a non-answer.

We cribbed from the 800 questions posed by Loup, suggested queries on Amazon, Google and Apple’s websites, and social media topics.

Google, via the Home speaker, told us how to get to the nearest Mexican restaurant, what time the

Avengers movie was playing, who won the Best Picture Oscar of 1989, the date and flight number of my next airline trip and the definition of a first cousin once removed. Google Assistant couldn’t:

Read our latest G-mail email aloud. Which Siri could do, but not Alexa.

Google Back to the Future.

Tell me, “Who was Jesus

Christ.”

Answer if aliens really exist and why cats have whiskers. (Alexa has responses for both, and Siri was happy to tell me about Jesus.)

Alexa was surprisingly strong when it came to science factoids that Google excels in, such as naming the melting point of gold, how far away the moon is from the Earth and citing the weight of the sun.

Apple has the data. If Amazon and Google can do it, there’s no reason why Siri can’t join this party.