Siri is the dumber of the four major voice assistants. She can only tell jokes for many years.

It's no secret that Siri is the dumbest of all voice-activated personal assistants when it comes to answering questions or providing basic information. This shouldn't be news. Basically, when compared to Amazon's Alexa, Google's Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri often ranks at the bottom. In the words of many users, Siri is really stupid. But what's more interesting is that tests have shown that Siri's actual performance is worse than the "dumbest", because he is not only stupid but also embarrassing, and he can only tell jokes after so many years.

Recently, information company Stone Temple conducted a very rigorous question-and-answer test on the capabilities of Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Siri, with the number of questions tested reaching 4,952. If the answers of these voice intelligent assistants can directly give complete answers, it means that they can give users 100% of the information they want without requiring further thinking or research by the users. The result was not surprising to everyone. Siri lost again.

Although no voice assistant performed particularly well throughout the test, Google Assistant for smartphones answered questions correctly 74.6% of the time, the best performance of all. Microsoft Cortana and Google Assistant for Google Home followed closely behind, with accuracy rates of 59.5% and 58% respectively. Amazon's Alexa lagged behind slightly, with an accuracy rate of 44.3%.

As for Apple's Siri, it is too backward. The accuracy rate of answering questions is only 32.7%, which is 30%. And Siri cannot answer a large number of questions. Obviously, this is a terrible performance.

Look at the bar chart below, which mainly shows the percentage of each voice intelligent assistant "trying to answer questions" and the percentage of "completely answering questions" to the total number of "answered questions". The so-called "trying to answer questions" means that the intelligent assistant can understand the question and try to answer it instead of telling you "I'm still learning" or "I don't know". "Completely answering questions" means that it can directly and fully answer the precise questions asked by the user without the user having to think too much.

The results showed that Siri only attempted to answer 40.2% of the questions, which is pretty bad. In other words, Siri couldn't answer 60% of the questions at all. Among all the voice intelligent assistants, Siri was the only one that answered less than half of the questions. In contrast, Google Assistant for mobile phones answered 77.2% of the questions. In addition, Siri not only answered fewer questions, but also answered the questions it answered correctly 100% of the time, specifically 80%, while Google Assistant for mobile phones reached 95.2%.

I believe most of you know how long these voice assistants have been around. Apple's Siri was the first but is currently the worst. In fact, Siri first appeared on the iPhone as a third-party app as early as 2010. It was not until 2011 that Apple acquired the company that developed this app and made it a default feature of iOS. Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa were both launched in 2014. Google's Google Assistant was not released until 2016.

From a time perspective, Apple's Siri clearly has a huge lead, as the cumulative time since its launch is almost twice that of Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa, and more than three times that of Google's Google Assistant. However, its ability to answer questions as a personal assistant lags far behind its competitors. The key is that the assistants of competitors have made progress far beyond Siri every year. If Siri really has human nature, then it should be annoyed that it is the dumbest one.

To be honest, it's embarrassing that Siri's performance is so poor after nearly seven years, because in the Stone Temple test report, Siri's only ability to tell jokes was the best. Among all the questions about telling jokes, Siri was the best at telling jokes in 2017, and it is still not inferior even in 2018 (as shown below). However, I believe that users need a voice intelligent assistant that can do more than just telling jokes.

Of course, Apple did not give up on Siri and poached John Giannandrea, former head of Google's AI and search business, to be in charge of machine learning and artificial intelligence projects, which is expected to help further improve Siri. As for how stupid Siri is, you can read Stone Temple's full test report (click here).