Who's Smarter? Alexa, Google Home or Siri

Google Home just a bit smarter than Alexa.

However,  USAToday writes Google has a long ways to catch up when it comes to the share of smart home devices. Amazon has Alexa in some 12,000 connected devices, compared to 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 the informal survey but many other recent ones as well, including surveys from online marketing firm Stone Temple and investment company Loup Ventures.

Jefferson Graham at USAToday  spent the weekend asking 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.

The results:  Google answered correctly 80% of the time, compared to 78% for Amazon and 55% correct for Siri.

According to Graham,  if Google and Amazon gave 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.

Our questions came from a variety of courses: We cribbed from the 800 questions posed in recent surveys by Loup, the suggested queries on Amazon, Google and Apple's websites to ask their assistants, and topics offered by social media.

Google, via the Home speaker, told us how to get to the nearest Mexican restaurant, what time the Avengers movie was playing at the cineplex, who won the Best Picture Oscar of 1989, the date and flight number of my next scheduled airline flight and the definition of a first cousin once removed.

What it couldn't tell us was also quite interesting. Some notable Google Assistant failures. It couldn't:

• Read our latest G-mail email aloud. Which Siri could do, but not Alexa. 
• Google the movie 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 about Jesus.)

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

Both Google and Amazon can play your morning news briefings — Siri doesn't do this. Alexa can read recipes, and being that it's Amazon, also order paper towels, batteries, dog food or even shop for an iPad. Siri couldn't do any of this with audio directions, instead answering "Here's what I found on the Web," and links.

But Graham concludes, it's Apple that has its work cut out for it, not Google. And he offers a simple suggestion:  Siri needs to stop directing users "to the Web," and instead announce actual answers, just like Google Home and Alexa.