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Google’s smart home speaker answered a lot more questions than Amazon’s Alexa, beating the latter in a quiz complete with 3,000 questions. A New York-based digital agency named 360i conducted the research to find out which smart home speaker among the two is more intelligent. The agency used a proprietary software to ask some 3,000 questions to both Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Google Home. The results showed that Google Home is six times more likely to answer the question correctly than the competition. The results are indeed surprising; however, it does make sense considering how differently both the companies approach their assistant’s technology.
Although the consumers give more preference to Amazon’s voice assistant than Google’s offering, the result shows that Google’s smart home assistant is a lot more intelligent. This is mainly because the search engine giant uses its knowledge graph, to source the information requested by the user. The knowledge graph is a database of facts collected from all over the web. Amazon, on the other hand, relies on the content partners to pull these data. This is no match to Google vast sets of data, and hence it naturally falls short. The agency did not reveal the information as to how many of these 3,000 questions were general knowledge versus service requests. This can also have a tremendous impact on the result since both the assistants have different keywords that trigger particular requests.
For example, when a user asks Google home to lower the temperature using a particular command, the Nest thermostat which is linked to it might do the job just fine. However, when the same command is given to Amazon’s Alexa, it might not get it done since it requires different command sets that require specific trigger words. Having said that, it is worth noting the fact that a lot more products in the market are compatible with Alexa than Google Home. Hence even if it might take a few more attempts to get them to work with Alexa, a user can at least rely on it to work, which might not be the case with Google Home. In fact, now even smart home devices such as doorbells, cameras, etc. work with Amazon Echo, which indicates that the technology is growing every day.