Research from by digital agency Stone Temple shows Siri was able to answer only one in five questions asked of it. And they weren’t trying to trick it either.
They tried out 5000 questions (including general knowledge and some standard tasks like reminders) on all the leading digital assistants and they all did poorly, but Siri did the worst.
I notice they didn’t ask any of these assistants to read email. Bearing in mind email is the number one activity smartphones are used for, this seems to be missing.
It is unrealistic to expect a general assistant to be able to do everything. Digital assistants are generally best for single answer questions, rather than engaging in an activity.
This is where our voice controlled email reading app Speaking Email has an edge.
It addresses this shortcoming. It is a dedicated app for doing just email reading. Its smarts are around detecting email signatures, disclaimers, reply threads you have seen, and other clutter, and surfacing the important content. It has voice commands to archive, flag, trash, reply by dictation and forward.
It doesn’t attempt to answer 5000 random questions, and it doesn’t have to, so it can focus on being good at helping you get through your backlog of emails.
Activity-dedicated voice apps make sense. The general assistants are creating the demand – consumers (and businesses) are wanting to use smart voice technology. But the assistants are stumbling, not having the smarts to engage in involved activities, and this is where Speaking Email shines.
https://www.stonetemple.com/digital-personal-assistants-test
Speaking Email 