If you spend much time chatting to a digital assistant on a smart speaker or your phone, you'll be interested in a new study that put nearly 5,000 questions to Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Cortana from Microsoft.

The test by digital agency Stone Temple found that Google's AI-powered bot was the smartest of the bunch overall, taking on close to 80 percent of queries fired at it and coming up with the right answer more than 9 times out of 10 for the questions it tried to respond to. According to the study, Google Assistant is slightly smarter on a phone than it is on a smart speaker.

In terms of questions where an answer was actually attempted, Cortana sits in second place with Alexa in third. Siri languishes in fourth place, with Apple's digital assistant only having a go at a little over 40 percent of the questions it was given.

Gains from 2017

Siri fared better in answer accuracy – it may only have attempted a response for 4 out of 10 queries, but of the answers it gave, 8 out of 10 were accurate. That still wasn't enough to lift it out of fourth place though, as all the other assistants still performed better.

Stone Temple actually ran the same test last year, with Google Assistant once again coming out on top. However, both Alexa and Cortana have made big strides forward when it comes to number of attempted answers compared with 2017, so there's not much breathing space for complacency for Google Assistant.

Some of the questions the apps struggled with were "who is the voice of Darth Vader?" and "how to make sand?", so it would appear these bots aren't quite ready to take over the world yet. You can see the full report over at the Stone Temple blog.

Via Gizmodo