The latest version of Android, 4.1, which is labeled Jelly Bean was released back in June and it came with a surprising feature. Google incorporated a voice assistant called Google Now into the system and it matches Siri, the voice assistant in the iPhone on almost all fronts and even surpasses it in a few cases. While Siri is a separate application in the iPhone that comes by default, Google Now is integrated into the search feature of Android and takes care of the tasks as you speak to it and this nifty trick makes invoking it much easier.
Using Google Now is pretty simple and rather straightforward and the user just has to speak the query into the search function and the regular Google search is used to get the results. It appears that voice recognition is quite impressive, according to reviews and the efficiency of the Google search engine is visible here. In addition to merely searching the web for data, Google Now can also access a few functions of the phone such as the messages, emails etc but in this department, Siri is quite superior to Google Now.
An interesting feature of Google Now is that users can search for data by typing instead of speaking. While Siri is exclusively voice based, Google Now has the flexibility that makes it easier to use the search function with the help of auto complete. Moreover, disabling the voice search is very simple but the difference is that voice queries return voice responses while text queries show the searching. Factual data is also easy to get through the service as it uses Wikipedia for the data. On the other hand, it appears that computational and mathematical work is better from Siri which relies on Wolfram Alpha.
There are a few areas in which Siri is clearly superior to Google Now. For example, the iPhone service is deeply integrated with the contacts, messages and other applications so any request is taken care of directly. On the other hand, Google Now doesn’t have access to the contacts and users can take notes but instead of using the native application like Siri does, an email is sent to the user’s own inbox with the request written out. The fully developed functionality of Google Now is quite impressive but it has quite some ground to cover before it can take on Siri entirely.
