Difference Between Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant

Artificial Intelligence primarily got its start in the 1950s when Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy defined AI.

Their definition goes something like this:

Any "Tasks performed by a program or a machine that,  when performed by a human, the human is required to use intelligence to accomplish the task (ZDNet, Heath, Feb.12, 2018).”

The AI that you see when you watched movies like HAL in 2001 or Skynet in the Terminator does not exist yet.

There is a big division in the AI community as to how soon it will become a reality.

Here three different AI’s that will be discussed Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assist, what each does and how they differ.

There have been several studies of the AI virtual assistants. The results were based on the accuracy of the response by using Google search.

Five Criteria Were Used To Rank Each Answer:

1. Was the question using the artificial voice?
2. Did the answer come from a known database?
3. Was the answer gleaned from a third-party source?
4. How often the questions were stumped in the AIs.
5. Did the AI formulate a wrong answer?

Who’s The Smartest Based On The Questions Asked:

* Google Assist answered 68.1% of the questions asked.

* Cortana answered Fifty-six percent of the questions asked

* Amazon Echo equipped with Alexa replied 20% of the   queries, a shoe-in for the last place.

Accuracy:

* Again Google vied for 1st place with complete and correct answers at 90.6 % of the questions asked.

* Cortana came in with 81.9 % of correct and complete answers.

* Alexa answered 87 % of the questions asked putting it right behind Google Assist for accuracy.

Not a complete surprise that Google Assist had such high numbers considering who its parent company is.

What Are The Factors For Such Diversity?

* There was more than one answer to the question.

* The assistant may answer a question with an answer that is close but is not the correct answer.

* The answer may be a partial, not entirely correct answer.

* The assistant may have told a joke; it did not know the answer.

* How about this the assistant got the answer completely wrong.

Each AI assistant has some good qualities and some not so good qualities.  From the test results, it appears that Google Assistant performs better than Alexa or Cortana. Cortana is a close second behind Google in the number of questions answered.  However, Alexa redeemed itself due to the accuracy of its answers. The reviews seemed to favor Google Assistant as the better performing AI. So, it is up to those who choose these devices as to which one they want to use.

Here is a little-known fact, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa both work in automobiles. Some car models have these AIs already added on.

Could this put a damper on the problem of people using cell phones while driving?