[wutbrodo]

> Personally, I preferred Cortana over Siri. And it basically comes down to speed and responsiveness. Cortana is much quicker to launch, and much quicker to find results.

I haven't used Cortana, and have only had disappointing experiences with Siri (after coming from Google Voice Search); how does the performance on Google Voice Search Compare? I wonder if the performance rankings are just a complete reversal of the quality rankings; If so, I wonder who's closest to the sweet spot?

[b2themax]

I haave used Google Now briefly with the Moto X. It is definitely faster than Siri in my experience. Speed is so important when it comes to these virtual assistants. I sincerely believe Siri is the worst of the bunch, which really stinks because I expected a lot more from a 900$ iPhone.

[mikeash]

Siri is entirely in The Cloud™ so your phone doesn't matter much, aside from the speed of its internet connection.

Have you tried it on iOS 8 since it came out? They finally added streaming voice recognition, which speeds it up a lot in my experience. Previously, it waited until you were done speaking to initiate the upload, which added a pretty big delay to any response.

[wutbrodo]

Holy cow, they JUST added streaming voice recognition? I haven't really followed Siri's progress since the early days but I thought that was table stakes, sheesh. I can't even imagine a voice service being usable in 2014 without it. Am I might just be completely out-of-touch with the current landscape for voice services, but Cortana isn't similarly hobbled, right?

[mikeash]

Yeah, it was a pretty glaring omission. You'd think it would be there from the start. I don't know about the others but I can't imagine they're not streaming as well.