The term AI in consumer context is more often than not referred to the virtual assistant which also enables connected home. When Amazon first launched the Echo which is a speaker with the virtual assistant ‘Alexa’ built in, it felt like magic. That’s the first time anyone have ever released a full scale consumer product with a platform for 3rd party integrations. And then came Google. During the first ever hardware launch, Google released a competitive product, Google Home, which is a smart speaker with Google Assistant built into it. It was the first time you could see all the Google AI research in display with the assistant offering all the Google’s knowledge using a single voice search. There’s more to it than just reading the results back, it can maintain the context while you speak to it, almost feels like you are speaking to some knowledgeable person about that particular topic, except this one knows everything.

While Apple or Microsoft have not yet commercially launch a similar product, they do have a very good digital assistants integrated into windows/ ios respectively.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled his pet project named ‘Jarvis’ which is the personal assistant + connected home similar to Alexa or Google Assistant. Though it is not launched yet out to the public, one can easily guess that Zuckerberg sees it as part of the Facebook future.

Let’s see common use cases where the AI is going to be helpful and predict which asistant going to win:

Scheduling/Productivity

• Google Assistant has integrations to only calendar, maps at the moment, but once there are integrations to all the Google products like Gmail, Keep, GSuite and to 3rd party apps like Uber/Opentable etc, it will be heavily useful. Also, imagine a new addition to the android sdk which integrates every app to the Assistant, that would bring billions of apps under the Assistant.
• Cortana with outlook, office , onenote integrations could be helpful.
• Alexa has its own Todo list app and some integrations to 3rd party apps, but it doesn’t have any productivity suite of its own.
• Siri has integrations currently to Notes, some apps like Uber, but if it could bring all the apps on ios integrated to it, this would be a major competitor to Google.

Entertainment

• Google Assistant has integrations to chromecast, play music, spotify, youtube which is very comprehensive. It can also tell jokes, play simple games.
• Alexa has integrations to Prime Music, Spotify, video library using fire stick.
• Cortana doesn’t have a lot of integrations apart from pulling the bing search results for the music/videos.
• Siri’s with the integration to Apple music, Apple TV gives iOS users has some options.

Connected Home

• Google Assistant currently supports integrations to a very few home automation products like TP Link switch, Nest Thermostat. But, they have opened their platform for developers to build ‘Actions’ and it might bring in tons of new automation products into their support ecosystem.
• Alexa leads in this category with support for tons of things like switches, bulbs, thermostat and some other electronics devices. It might take some time before everyone else catches up to Amazon on this.
• Cortana currently has very little support.
• Siri while directly don’t have support for home automation, the Apple Home app has a lot of integrations and soon Siri should be able to control all the connected devices.

While Jarvis is not publicly released yet, all we know from a video from Mark Zuckerberg posted is it’s very similar to what Alexa already does with more customization on voice and other things. I guess Jarvis to be integrated into Messenger sometime soon.

Here is the video of basic questions posed to Alexa, Google Home, Siri and Cortana. You can judge which one outperforms others.