If you’ve heard much about Samsung’s new Galaxy S III, you’ve probably heard about S Voice. In case you’re not familiar, S Voice is the new voice-activated personal assistant software that’s integrated into the Galaxy S III. Of course, in fine Samsung tradition, it totally doesn’t look anything at all like Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant software that’s integrated into the iPhone 4S. And by “totally doesn’t look anything at all like Siri,” I mean “looks an awful lot like Siri.”
Of course, in the great War of the Fanboys, there’s plenty of… discussion about whether Siri or S Voice is better, whether S Voice is a ripoff of Siri, and which smartphone is the fairest in the land (turns out neither phone gives the answer you’d expect).
Of course, the obvious answer to the debate is to put the two together in a head-to-head competition. And that’s just what you’ll find in the video below. As it turns out, Siri and S Voice are pretty evenly matched. While S Voice takes a little more time to perform certain tasks than Siri, it does them equally well. Of course, S Voice wins in one respect. The last test is finding a particular restaurant. While Siri balks (being as this is in Australia, where Siri doesn’t do local business searches), S Voice pulls up Google Maps and displays a route to the requested destination.
While that might seem to give S Voice a bit of a lead, iOS 6 will fix that when it launches this fall. Apple announced during their WWDC 2012 keynote on Monday that the iOS Maps app would be getting turn-by-turn navigation and local business search in a variety of new countries when it launches this fall.
Check out the video for yourself and decide who wins: