First Apple came along with its popular and fairly well advertised voice assistant called 'Siri', which debuted on Apple's iphone 4s. Than Google responded with it's own version of a voice assistant like feature called Google Now. Both have their pros and cons, but we're Android folk here and firmly believe that Google Now is the frontrunner of the two. While both companies race to become the must have voice activated technology of the next age, as reported by the ' Telegraph ', both Google and Apple are attempting to accomplish this goal by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on development of their voice assistants.
This expensive campaign to be the number one company to offer voice activated tasks, and voice assistant features is expected to be the next major battle in the war between Apple and Google. Both companies are spending lots of money and time to further the quality of their respective Voice assistant services, and both are doing so in their own way. While Apple is trying to better the quality of Siri after plenty of potshots have been taken at the voice assistant since its release, by acquiring companies that could help in the endeavor, Google is simply trying to handle everything in house, with its own engineers and team. As stated by a lead Google Engineering director Scott Huffman,
'The reason we feel pretty good in terms of competition is because what we're seeing and everything we're building today is built on top of the foundation of core web search rankings'.
Huffman is also noted saying that Google Now has an edge because of its ability and understanding of being able to distinguish when a user asks for something like photos, and when a user might be quoting a line from a song.
The goal between both companies, is to have their applications better understand the complexities of human speech so that they can give the user a correct spoken response when asked a question. Currently, Google Now does an ok job at providing you with such answers to some questions, but there is an infinite amount of room for improvement in this case as there are more questions than one can count that only receive 'Google Search' results list after they're asked. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but Google wants to provide a better interaction with Google Now by attempting to offer up an experience that is similar to that of the computer on the 'Starship Enterprise.' Basically when it breaks down to it, they want us to be able to ask questions and get a response that would be like you were asking a human being that had the answer to give you. Both companies are working hard to combat the hurdles they currently face with their apps, however we're of course pulling for Google to be the winner here as we're kind of partial to Google Now, since you can pair it with other apps like Tasker to automate nearly anything you set your mind to. What do you guys think of Google Now? Do you wish it had more to offer? Do you use it daily and love what it does in its current state? What would you like to see Google Now do in the future? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Gadgets, games, design, great food and craft beer are some of my passions. I hail from the northwest and try to utilize the beautiful weather by biking anywhere I can. I have a deep passion for android and have been in the android game since the G1. When I'm not writing for the site, you can find me playing League Of Legends, or playing one of my many Steam games. You may even spot my girlfriend and I destroying a few Toad portals. No one likes slime. I currently use a Nexus 4, and both versions of the Nexus 7
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