Digital voice assistants have become inevitable these days. Many people prefer to just make use of their voice to control devices while freeing up their hands to do something else and therefore allowing them to multitask. Not to mention it's less work and quicker. All of these factors gave birth to the voice assistants that are virtually present in almost all the latest smartphones. Let us take a look at three of the leading voice assistants today; Cortana, Siri and Google Now.

Cortana

The name was based on a character in the video game franchise Halo. It was unveiled alongside Windows Phone 8.1 at Build 2014. This digital assistant allows you to make calls, take notes, recognize music, send messages, set reminders, check the calendar and many other tasks. With this device also being powered by Bing, you can now ask for search results using your voice. It also has the ability to learn about you and at the same time understand the natural language that you use. It also has a notebook that stores the information that it has learned about you. Cortana has the ability to gather this information and use it in the future.

Siri

This is considered to be the leader when it comes to intelligent voices. It works just like your personal assistant; it can be commanded to call people, send messages, launch apps/games, play music, make reminders and even provide weather forecasts. Since it first came out, Siri has already improved drastically in terms of its ability to recognize voices. However, despite being the first one to really go public, it is not necessarily that popular among iPhone users, with only 15.2 percent of the users having tried it.

Google Now

For the most part, it functions just like the other two. It also has the ability to store information that you might use later on. It has the ability to easily analyze your preferences and it is perfect when used to remind you about your appointments.

From among these three, Cortana has really shaken things up by providing more features than the other two. Users can probably expect to see improvements in the future.