How Voice Assistants Contribute to the Search Industry
The search industry has been undergoing tremendous changes in the past decade, notably with the rise in popularity of voice assistants. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are constantly trying to surpass each other’s achievements to make the perfect voice assistant, an incredibly ambitious and difficult task. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana work using all different algorithms. Alexa and Google Assistant employ machine learning technology to further improve performance with time, however, this comes at a cost to the consumer. In the context of voice assistant technology, machine learning works by storing the consumer’s data and using it to predict what questions may follow come. This raises privacy concerns for the consumer and their data could be sold and is often then used in targeted advertisements. While Amazon and Google have elected to use this technology to better the voice assistant, Apple instead prioritizes privacy and uses deep learning technology that does not store consumer data. This can be frustrating in the context of asking follow up questions or the generally more limited capabilities of the voice assistants.
We can apply our knowledge from class to compare the capabilities of these devices. Alexa largely relies on Wikipedia for answers to general queries and often can be confused by phrasing due to Wikipedia’s less complex link-to-link structure and may suffer from information scarcity. Cortana uses Bing, which is an improvement but also is generally considered inferior to Google’s algorithm. Siri uses Google as its primary search engine and Google Assistant uses all of Google’s data to draw answers to queries. These will produce more accurate results due to the stronger and larger “bow tie” structure of the web and Google’s sophisticated page rank algorithms that give the most relevant answer. Using our knowledge from this class we can conclude that currently, the best voice assistant option would be the Google assistant, but this does come at the cost of sacrificed privacy.
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https://gearpatrol.com/2017/07/19/how-does-a-virtual-assistant-work/