A decade ago, the concept of ordering an audio-controlled robot to do everything from setting a timer to playing music to making video calls was not on most people's radars. Now, the digital assistants we use on our smartphones, smart speakers, and even smart displays are ubiquitous. We wanted to find out how people perceive these assistants—so we surveyed 1,041 folks over age 18.
First, the voice assistant that respondents perceive as "most intelligent" is Amazon's Alexa, the tech inside the company's Echo products and a lot of third-party products as well. Forty-four percent of those surveyed think Alexa is the brainiest, beating out second-place Google Assistant, rated smartest by 33%; Apple's Siri isn't far behind in third place.
That's a trend we found: Amazon, Google, and Apple's more mature assistants top the results, leaving Microsoft's Cortana in the dust. (Cortana has already been pulled from app stores, so it's a Windows-only solution now.) And the less said about Samsung's Bixby the better, honestly.
Does a voice assistant's perceived intelligence result in more usage? It does not. The most-used is Google Assistant, at 39%. Alexa is behind at 36%.
Note that the numbers don't add up to a clean 100% because people were allowed to make multiple choices. True techies probably use several of these audio-bots. Also worth noting is that a full 21% of respondents said they don't use a virtual assistant all that much. That number is larger than those of the also-ran assistants from Microsoft and Samsung.
We also found that intelligence doesn't equate with trustworthiness. Apparently, Alexa hasn't garnered much of the latter.
Twenty-eight percent of our respondents said Alexa was the virtual assistant they'd least trust with their data. Apple and Google tied for second place, which is odd considering Apple's recent attempts to shore up privacy in iOS. You'd think Siri might have emerged as more trustworthy than Microsoft, at least. But maybe those moves aren't working yet. Shocking!