You’ll never guess which voice is best
With rumors suggesting Apple’s Siri voice assistant may get an upgrade at WWDC 2024, I’ve been looking back over our thirteen years with Siri to see what, if anything, has improved. Is Apple’s voice assistant still the best around, or does it really need some dramatic improvements? In a side-by-side test against the best voice assistant software, Siri was not the best, not even close. In fact, the best will probably surprise you.
Siri started life as an app in 2010, but Apple quickly bought the voice assistant and began improving it. Siri was fully integrated into iOS the following year. Back then, we thought of Siri (and Alexa) as tools for checking the weather, setting timers, and asking simple questions, like how much is Oprah worth?
When Siri was launched, it couldn’t control many of the features on your phone, but now it has some ability to press the buttons for you and find hidden settings, if you know what they’re called.
Siri can still calculate the tip at dinner, but now it can also help you find your Apple Watch or where you parked your car. It can turn on the lights, set the thermostat, and remind you to pick up your dry cleaning as you leave the house. Siri isn’t the only game in town, here comes Gemini and Bixby
Of course, Siri isn’t the only voice assistant in town. Samsung replaced its simpler S Voice assistant with Bixby in 2017. Bixby was introduced as an interface first and a virtual friend and helper second.
Samsung launched Bixby as a voice interface that would control all of your Samsung products, including your phone, your TV, your washing machine, and your refrigerator. It hasn’t given up on that promise, but it’s been slowly developed.
Bixby isn’t exactly an AI as we currently think of them because it doesn’t use a large language model (LLM) to understand your input or create a response. Neither does Siri, as far as we know.
Both of those assistants could get a huge upgrade soon, as Samsung has been touting its Galaxy AI features with every new phone launch, and Apple has already hinted that AI is coming to its products in a big way, perhaps at WWDC 2024.
If you don’t want to wait for an assistant that uses an LLM for its responses, you’ll want a Google Pixel with Gemini on board. Gemini is Google’s LLM, and when you load the app on your Android phone, it offers to replace Google Assistant, Google’s older voice assistant. Gemini still uses Google Assistant to do some of its job, but it also uses other Google apps and features. The test: 25 requests for my voice assistants
I tested Siri, Bixby, and Gemini – against each other on the best phones from each manufacturer: an Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and a Google Pixel 8 Pro.
