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Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

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Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#3
Slightly OT, but in school I remember a teach talking about how good voice to text has gotten but was stuck, stating it was roughly about a 70% accuracy, but that we were pretty much at a wall there and haven't moved much in the last decade.

Has there been any major advances in voice recognition other than just growing your speech corpus?

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#4
It seemed to me that Cortana returned the most correct answers without any extra fluff. The google results seemed to have the same accuracy but the phone said so much extra information in that monotonic voice that the clarity of the result was lost in the noise.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#5
The article concludes that google is dramatically ahead, which is no suprise

but I AM suprised, anecdotally, how good Siri is vs previous iterations on my iphone 6 and OS 8

It feels close to "good enough" for the majority of functions I actually use eg: dictate an email, get directions, lookup a contact, and dial a phone number.

My sense is that Apple will nail the base functions so that most users, self included, won't notice a difference between the two.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#6
Someone submitted this and deleted it a bit before this submission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8430202

Anyway, there I was trying to find out which speech recognition software was more accurate. How do these compare to Dragon?

It seems like we're quite close to being able to actually using voice dictation without the frustration.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#7
post #3

Slightly OT, but in school I remember a teach talking about how good voice to text has gotten but was stuck, stating it was roughly about a 70% accuracy, but that we were pretty much at a wall there and haven't moved much in the last decade. Has there been any major advances in voice recognition other than just growing your speech corpus?

Just machine learning algorithms and more data.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#8
post #3

Slightly OT, but in school I remember a teach talking about how good voice to text has gotten but was stuck, stating it was roughly about a 70% accuracy, but that we were pretty much at a wall there and haven't moved much in the last decade. Has there been any major advances in voice recognition other than just growing your speech corpus?

I think it's been mostly throwing hardware at the problem. Server hardware, backed by terabytes of context data.

I remember back in the day, most of the errors were the exact same errors that a human would make. Even you and I only really hear 95% or so of the words someone says. But we can fill in the rest from the context. It always amazes me when I dictate some sentence to my phone, and at the end I see one of the words change to another that sounds almost identical but makes much more sense in the entire context of the sentence.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#9
FWIW, I just switched from Windows Phone to iOS -- from the 1020 to iPhone6+. Personally, I preferred Cortana over Siri. And it basically comes down to speed and responsiveness. Cortana is much quicker to launch, and much quicker to find results. I haven't noticed any discernable difference in their query results. And actually, for one of the my most used queries - "What is the weather today?" -- I dont even use it on iOS because the stock weather app is disappointing, I use Yahoo. Cortana telling me the weather was much more usable. Siri is just so freaking slow, that I rarely use her.

Re: Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

#10
Oh awesome, let's see... how many atoms are there in the universe?

"The number of atoms in the entire observable universe is estimated to be within the range of 1078 to 1082."

Thank you Google! http://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+atoms+are+in+the+uni...]

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