Personal assistants help us to manage our lives, control our smartphones, and search the web faster than ever. They are like little maids and butlers, silently waiting in our handsets for us to give them a task. And when we do, they draw on our email, calendar, contacts, search history, location, and repeated habits to give us the best possible answer or experience.
Since Windows, Android and iOS have their voice assistants in place, it’s time to pit our phone-friends against each other again. The iPhone has Siri. Android has Google Now. Windows Phone has Cortana.
For the most part, as we can see, Cortana, Siri, and Google Now are mostly on even foot. Each one of them can field most of our standard voice control questions with ease, and Cortana gives a tough competition to Siri’s personality but without the lag that is more noticeable than ever in the face of ever-faster competition.
Who is Cortana?
Cortana is Microsoft’s long-awaited personal assistant. It debuted in 2014 as part of Windows Phone 8.1. Microsoft said it was inspired by a popular AI character from the Halo game franchise, so the company named its personal assistant Cortana after the character. Cortana is powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine and it supposedly gets better over time, remembers our behaviour, monitors our activity and filters out the noise so we can focus on what matters to us. Cortana is still in beta version.
Who is Google Now?
Google Now is a three-year-old personal assistant developed by Google. It responds to voice and text queries and serves up relevant information (in the form of specialised cards) based on our repeated habits, location data, search history, and information leveraged from the Knowledge Graph. We can access Google Now in Google’s Search apps for Android and iOS and the Google Chrome browser. It is therefore available across many platforms, unlike Siri and Cortana, which are respectively limited to iOS and Windows Phone 8.1
Who is Siri?
Siri is a personal assistant hard-coded into Apple’s company’s iOS software. It first appeared with the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 after Apple acquired the developer company behind it. Siri responds to voice queries using natural language. It can answer questions in a witty manner, make recommendations, perform tasks, and load information through supported web services. Siri isn’t cross-platform and is locked to iOS, though the feature recently added support for specific vehicles through Apple’s CarPlay.
Now lets these compare in terms of features :
| Cortana | Goggle Now | Siri | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Activation | It has a search button which needs to be pressed to activate Cortana.(“Hey Cortana” is available for few handsets) | It has a always-listening feature, which allows users to activate Google Now at any time by saying “OK, Google.” | It is same as Cortana, as in a button needs to be pressed to activate it.(“Hey Siri” is available for few handsets) |
| Personal questions | It has a bit of personality. | It is just a computer returning search results. | It was one of the first digital assistants with an attitude. |
| Voice | It is locked to implement Jen Taylor’s dulcet tones. | It offers no customization to existing options. | It arguably distinguishes itself the most, with customizable voices that even allow you to choose a male voice if you don’t like the original female one. |
| Search engine | It uses Bing. | It uses Google’s search engine. | It also uses Bing |
| Taking note | It saves the notes to OneNote | It saves notes to Gmail. | It saves it to Notes app. |
Final word :
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Google Now is good in-terms of query analysis and searching whereas Siri and Cortana have a personality aspect.
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