If you're looking for a personal assistant that can handle complex tasks, Siri might be the best option for you. On the App Store, there are many assistants that can perform various tasks, but not all of them are created equal. One of the challenges with using these assistants is that they often require complicated setups or have limitations.
For instance, Siri can't order a pizza in certain parts of the world, while Google Assistant can hail an Uber and order pizza on Google Home. However, this is the bleeding edge, and not all five assistants will have access to these features. Functionality is generally unstable or incomplete, but promising.
Cortana can turn on Philips Hue lights on Xbox One, although it had to cut out eight failed attempts due to instability. It's a real pain that Siri and Google Assistant couldn't do better in terms of region and device consistency. On the other hand, Alexa performed the best in this category, failing only one question.
Despite being used on cheap, underpowered POS tablets, Excel excelled. Alright folks, you've hung in there this long; it's time to decide a winner and get on with our day. Google Assistant is exceptional at context, one of the drawbacks of most other personal assistant apps is that you have to get the command just right to complete the task.
Google Assistant is very good at figuring out what you need even if you ask it to do the same thing in two entirely different ways. However, we are vastly disappointed that Google Home gets all the fun features like casting video and ordering pizza while their devices don't. It's the best all-around pick, even if we have to wait for those awesome features to be available on our phones.
Amazon Alexa is probably the most customizable assistant here. It doesn't do much out of the box but you can install these things called skills that increase functionality dramatically. I had to install several of these skills over the course of making this video and most of them worked really well.
Additionally, Alexa excels at gathering information through conversation to complete a task like ordering a pizza. When it comes to pure functionality, Alexa can do more than all of the other personal assistants. Alexa-enabled devices work exceptionally well with one another, although it sucks that so few devices are compatible and Amazon's Android experience is vastly inferior to Google's.
Alexa did perform better in terms of handling tasks like ordering a pizza, none of the other ones did. Siri did surprisingly well during every round of this test, Apple has been doing well with keeping Siri competitive with everybody else. It feels like a solid option, and it also has exceptional backwards compatibility.
I performed this test on a first-generation iPad Air and I know it did just as well as the latest iPhone would have done considering that the Pixel Excel on Android Oreo doesn't even do as well as Google's Home device. You're not going to be disappointed unless you need something specifically that Siri can't do. Cortana's biggest strength is being available freakin everywhere like Starbucks or political events.
iOS, Android, Windows 10, and Xbox One means that it's available on more devices than every other personal assistant. It's not a close measurement; you can't get any other personal assistant application on your phone, computer, and gaming system at the same time. However, Cortana has more potential than any assistant here.
However, Microsoft really needs to step up their game a lot because their assistant is kidding rekt right now. That brings us to the wild card with Bixby, Bixby did a surprisingly good job during testing, and where it excels the most is feeling like an actual personal assistant when it performs tasks.
It has the ability to emulate screen taps like an actual freaking person and that lets it interact with on-screen elements better than any other assistant. It's unrivaled for boring mundane tasks like rotating images in your gallery downloading apps, cleaning out your browser history, and a lot more.
It's really too bad that you could only have this on a few devices, and that its home automation features are stuck behind a 50-dollar proprietary Samsung hub. Although it still needs a lot of work, especially when it comes to tertiary features such as big speed vision.
It's better than Cortana and at least as good as Siri; we'd love to hear what you think too, drop a comment and let us know which one you use and why, and that about does it for this one folks. Don't forget to subscribe to Android Authority and ring the bell to get the latest Android Authority videos as soon as they're released.
Thanks again for watching everybody and have a wonderful day.