Which Virtual Assistant is Smartest and least Trusted
A decade ago, the concept of hiring an audio-controlled robot to try and do everything from setting a timer to playing music to creating video calls wasn’t on most people’s radar.
Today, the digital assistants that we use on our smartphones and smart speakers are all over. We wanted to search out how people perceive these assistants. That’s why we surveyed 1,041 people over the age of 18.
First, the voice assistant that respondents find “most intelligent” is Amazon’s Alexa, the technology within the company’s Echo products, and plenty of third-party products.
44 percent of respondents think Alexa is that the smartest and beat the second-placed Google Assistant, which was rated the neatest by 33%; Apple̵ Siri isn’t far behind in third place.
That’s a trend we’ve found: Amazon, Google, and Apple’s more sophisticated assistants lead the results, leaving Microsoft’s Cortana within the dust.
Cortana was already pulled out of the app stores, so it’s now a Windows-only solution, and therefore the less that’s said about Samsung’s Bixby, the better, frankly.
Does the perceived intelligence of a voice assistant cause more use? It doesn’t. The Google Assistant is employed most frequently with 39%. Alexa is 36% behind.
Note that the numbers don’t make a clean 100% because people were allowed to form multiple choices.
True tech geeks are likely to use several of those audio bots.
It’s also noteworthy that 21% of the respondents stated that they do not use a virtual assistant the maximum amount.
This number is larger than that of the Microsoft and Samsung wizards that were also run.
We also found that intelligence isn’t synonymous with trustworthiness
Apparently, Alexa didn’t notice much of the latter.
28 percent of our respondents said that Alexa was the virtual assistant to whom they might least trust their data.
Apple and Google share second place, which is strange given Apple’s recent attempts to shield privacy in iOS.
You’d think Siri would at a minimum have proven more trustworthy than Microsoft. But maybe these steps don’t work yet. Shocking!
