Which voice assistant is best for answering questions? If you guessed Siri, you’re wrong

Depending on the type of smartphone or tablet you own, the chances are you’ll stick to one voice assistant app for answering your questions. If you have an Android, you’ll use Google Now. If you have an iPhone, you’ll use Siri. And if you have a Windows Phone, you’ll use the recently released Cortana. They’re all programmed to answer your questions as quickly and helpfully as possible, but which one of them is the best?

According to a study by the firm Stone Temple Consulting, each of the three voice apps were tested with 3,086 real-world questions structured to decide which voice app gave the best responses. The winner by a sizeable margin was Google Now.

voice-google-siri-cortana-global-comparison-2

“All queries in this test were done using voice commands, even when using Google and Bing. The reason we did this is that there are many commands in Google and Bing that behave differently when the search query is typed in, and we wanted to do a straight apples to apples comparison.” Eric Enge of Stone Temple explained.

You can watch staff members of Stone Temple Consulting explain the basics of how they did their study below. You can also check out the in-depth study over at Stone Temple Consulting’s website, which is linked below in our source section.