Why Apple’s Siri has the edge in the growing voice-assistant wars
Siri speaks 21 languages localised for 36 countries, achieved by a complicated process of human reading, transcribing, and two-weekly real-world tweaks
San Francisco — With the broad release of Google Assistant last week, the voice-assistant wars are in full swing, with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and now Alphabet’s Google, all offering electronic assistants to take your commands. Siri is the oldest of the bunch and researchers, including Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, said Apple has squandered its lead when it comes to understanding speech and answering questions. But there is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localised for 36 countries — a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the US. Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13 countries. Google’s Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazon’s Alexa features only English and German. Siri, on the other hand, will even start to learn Shanghainese soon, a spe...
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