Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, both are voice assistants that have been designed to make your home smarter. Voice assistant that can also be called as digital assistants provides benefits to its users through smart phone and apps that supports voice AIs through speech synthesis, voice recognition and natural language processing. In order to determine who the winner is, we need to look at the differences between these two voice AIs and compare their strength and weaknesses.
- Recognizing Voice
Unlike the IPhones Siri is not able to recognize voices on Home Pods since it does not have voice training capabilities. This means that no matter who asks the question response will be similar for everyone. On the other hand Amazon Alexa has voice training capabilities. With this feature Alexa can get accustomed to the whole family or different people who can custom train Alexa to get customized response or customized action where required. If we talk about the Siri then we certainly find the depth of personalization missing from it. On the other hand if we talk about Alexa we will find that a lot needs to be improved on the customization feature as it can be easily tricked by changing voices or pretending to be someone else.
- Making Calls
When we talk about IPhones we can easily make calls by telling Siri to dial and mentioning the name of the contact that we wish to speak to. The feature works perfectly fine as far as the iPhone is concerned. When we talk about the Home Pods and give Siri the same command on it, it will not be able to execute your request since Home Pod does not support this feature. We can only dial or receive calls on our IPhones which we can then transfer to Home Pods in order to listen to them on speaker. Alexa on the other hand works differently. It can easily dial calls with basic voice commands and receive calls from other echo speakers. This feature on Alexa does not support cells and landline calls. If we talk about messaging then both Alexa and Siri can send messages.
- Music Services
Talking about musical services on Amazon Alexa, you can play a Spotify song with a simple voice command as it supports wide range of third party music services. On the other hand if we talk about Home Pods then Siri is unable to execute this function since Home Pods only supports Apple approved music services. So if you want Home Pods to play music via third party music services like YouTube then by using Apples Airplay feature song can be manually sent via IPhones or any other IOS Device.
- General Questions
Talking about the general questions both Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa did a great job by answering basic general questions. Questions like the nearest station, name of nearby restaurant and information on the music being played were responded well. Talking about the follow up questions, Siri responded very well. Like if we post a question about a particular football team and then further ask the stats of a particular player without mentioning the name of team again it seem to do a great follow up by answering the questions correctly. Alexa on the other hand was good in answering questions but in respond to a follow up question it couldn’t quite follow it.
- Smart Home
When it comes to make your home smarter than Apple Siri on the Home Pods are quite easy to setup. All the info related to Wi-Fi devices and any other Home Kit products that are on your iOS device will be automatically sent to the Home Pods making it look extremely user friendly and simple. All smart home devices are closely regulated and supported by Apple directly and can be easily used by giving a basic command. This allows Home Pod users for a more smooth experience but only across limited set of devices. Alexa on the other hand partner engineer work around for devices that it do not support.
Overall if we compare both Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa we will see find that both have strong and weak points. Strong point of Apple Siri is the smooth experienced of using it and very simple and easy to set up. The weak point being its limited approach by facilitating only Apple products or Apple registered services only. The strong point of Alexa is that it facilitates the use of third party products and third party services and the weak point being unable to answer the follow up questions.
Author’s Bio
Michael Andrew did masters in computer science and is working in a multinational company. He is also an author of several at Do My Essay For Me books.
