Siri or Alexa? Who would you choose?

I frequently find myself interacting with Siri on my phone when I am too lazy to set a reminder or respond to an email or text. This weekend I spent some time interacting with Siri and tried to get to know my virtual assistant on a deeper level.

I own a Fitbit which has a built-in Alexa and have permanently disabled Alexa for obvious reasons. For this “experiment” I decided to activate it again so I could compare the two to see which felt more natural. Since I was already acquainted with Siri, I decided to start with Alexa.

I immediately noticed that Alexa was using my sister’s name to address me which is VERY creepy because we don't share an Amazon account and my watch was able to sync with her Amazon Echo, while we’re in two very different parts of the world. The interaction with Alexa seemed less natural than Siri at first because my Fitbit doesn’t have any built-in speakers, so Alexa wasn’t speaking back to me as Siri does. It was a one-sided conversation where I was talking and Alexa was replying through text. Once I got to know Alexa slightly better, I decided to test to see which of the two- Siri or Alexa- was better.

I ended up talking to the two at the same time so that my diction and questions were consistent. Siri was way quicker at responding than Alexa was. However, I did like that Alexa gives exact responses and not a Siris (series, ha! ) of search results like Siri does. I prefer Alexa’s exact responses because she does the work for me, whereas with Siri’s responses I have to go through the search results and click on the desired one which will then redirect me to the default browser. The only reason I would use a virtual assistant for such queries is that I don't want to go through the effort of finding an answer, but Siri’s response makes the process redundant. One thing I would change about Alexa’s response is that there should be a reference included that directs the user to the source from which the response was taken. I think it just makes it more credible that way.

While I was exploring the capabilities of Alexa, I noticed that there was a command to train Alexa to recognize my voice. This was interesting and I assumed that Siri could do that too. Upon asking Siri if I could train her to recognize my voice, I got the following response: “ I can't do that”. There is definitely a way to train Siri to recognize someone's voice but, it is complicated and not as intuitive. It is interesting that Siri has been around for a while, yet it hasn't kept up with her AI colleagues.

Toward the end of my interaction with Alexa and Siri, I didn’t try to declare a winner. However, I noticed myself mimicking computerized, robotic speech. It was interesting to observe how naturally my tone shifted while talking to the virtual assistants, almost like a reflex. While virtual assistants have adapted to mimic a more human-like speech pattern, I do believe that humans also tend to adopt computer-like mannerisms while interacting with their devices. There is definitely a two-way compromise and virtual assistants won’t truly ever perfectly mimic human-like speech patterns because a tiny part of us has subconsciously adapted to mimic computerized speech based on previous interactions with virtual assistants.

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