It has taken a day or two, but now videos are beginning to crop up comparing Apple’s Siri on the iPhone 4S to Google’s new voice options in the just announced Android 4.1, Jelly Bean.
One of the new features to come out of Google’s I/O event over the last few days is the new voice search feature that bears more than a passing resemblance to Siri. The reason for that may just be that Siri was the first to market, but it is an unfortunate fact that Apple’s digital assistant is going to be the standard that any competing solution is matched against.
Samsung’s S Voice has taken Siri on with limited success, with the Galaxy S III arguably giving Apple a run for its money in the voice control and search market whilst still not quite hitting the mark. Now that Google has set its stall out by bringing its own in-house solution to Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, things are just starting to get nice and interesting.
With Android 4.1 now beginning to be installed on some Galaxy Nexus handsets by those keen to try it out, TechnoBuffalo has put together a video that does the only thing anyone really could do at this point – compare Siri from the new iOS 6 beta to Google’s Jelly Bean voice control and search.
The results, as you can see from the video, are surprisingly positive for Google’s solution. Both devices make a good fist of getting the information requested and performing the tasks that are asked of them, but it is arguably Google’s offering that takes the crown thanks to showing more detailed responses to searches and simply throwing up data that is more useful. Siri’s results were definitely the most pleasing on the eye thanks to changes coming in iOS 6, but the Android option wins out for us.
With iOS 6 still a few months away from being made available publicly, and expected to be released alongside some new hardware, we don’t really know what to expect from Apple going forward. Improvements are expected and now that Google has announced its own version of voice-powered search, all bets are off. We’ll see how Apple responds to the new competition.
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