Siri was introduced as one of the most innovative features of iPhone 4S in October 2011. Now, it's about to face its biggest threat, Samsung's S Voice, a similar voice assistant designed for Samsung Galaxy SIII, the Samsung flagship Android phone which released in Europe earlier this week.
It's every geek's dream to have a device that can interact with them like KITT from Knight Rider. Right now both Apple and Samsung are trying to create the best voice assistant to make that dream come true. But none of them have managed to create the perfect voice assistant yet. Both Siri and S Voice require users to enunciate perfectly to make their query recognized. But even then some users get to hear some hilarious misinterpretations. That's a big problem for any app that is trying to make people's mobile using experience better.
Another problem with these voice assistants is its dependency on external search engines. Whenever they fail to find answers, they redirect all the queries to search engines. According to The Verge's Vlad Savov, S Voice is more dependent on Google, compared to Siri. Siri is also ahead of S Voice in terms of speed. Users get answers from Siri instantly which makes Apple's voice assistant a little bit better than S Voice.
Siri seems more vocal than S Voice and can satisfy users with its aural affirmation. But S Voice is quiet and prefers to provide all the results quietly. Users also have the option to turn off the responses made by S Voice.
However, as S Voice came later, it does offer some unique features that are not available in Siri, like note taking, checking the weather and schedule meetings. But these features are not polished yet and are not ready to be a real selling point for Galaxy SIII. S Voice can also perform geographical searches while Siri "seems to think everything I search for is within the UK and refuses to try and help with locational queries," Savov wrote.
Conclusion? "Siri is faster. S Voice can do more, but neither is really good enough."
Check out the S Voice versus Siri comparison video below:
