Virtual mobile assistants have become an ongoing trend, with Apple introducing Siri as a built-in feature on its iPhone 4S back in 2011. Google has Google Now, which is available for phones running on Android and iOS. It was introduced in 2012 as part of the Android 4.1 Jellybean OS and was made available for iOS in 2013. The newest among these is Microsoft's Cortana, which was only introduced this April as part of Windows 8.1. It is only available for Windows 8.1 phone users in the United Kingdom, China and the United States, while expected to be available worldwide by 2015.  

Technology indeed plays a major role in almost everyone's daily lives. Productivity tools are everywhere, even on smartphones. For a while now, Siri and Google Now were in constant battle for the title of the most excellent language-based assistant. For a long period of time, Siri was at the top of the ladder when it came to verbal interaction and voice recognition. But in recent surveys, Google Now is presenting a formidable challenge to Siri, Android Pit reports.

The Stone Temple Consulting group recently conducted a test to see which one among the three voice search assistants is better. The test they conducted gave each system 3,086 identical verbal questions. Google Now was able to provide answers to 58 percent of the questions (verbally and by text). Siri was able to answer 29 percent of the questions and Cortana only managed to answer 20 percent.

It would therefore seem that Google Now has managed to surpass Siri as the leader in voice search assistance. The exercise was actually designed to test only the knowledge vault of each system and not the personal assistance system, according to Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting and co-author of "The Art of SEO."

The test proved that all three AI agents did not do that well with the responses, which included enhanced results. Even Google Now only got 1,580 questions correct, with 88 percent of those correct answers including enhanced results or about 1,390 questions. Out of the 894 questions answered by Siri, those with enhanced results only amounted to 481 questions, and Cortana provided enhanced results to 253 questions out of the 617 it correctly answered.