Virtual personal assistant shootout: Talk the talk ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

What can I help you with? Hope your day is going well. It's a start. But it'll take time for the likes of Siri and Google Now to live up to the Intelligent Personal Assistant title. Surprisingly, intelligent isn't too far off for software that's context and location aware, does speech recognition and has an impressive backend of resources and services. Personal? Well, Google obviously knows who you are, where you are and what you've been up to lately. Yet, we'll stick to calling them virtual for now.

Assistant then is perhaps the trickiest bit. So it seems. And the question is (barring scenarios where your hands and eyes are busy with something else) whether we really need to do by voice what can be done at the click of a button - ok, a few buttons. And if it's info and content, can we not just Google it instead of having Google Now do it for us?

Anyway, things like Google Now and Siri are but a taste of what your smartphone can do for you. There's plenty of potential there and Apple and Google are hopefully looking beyond the launching of apps, personalized and localized search and voice typing. Not least because the hardware race isn't going to go on forever.

What you are experiencing isn't some sort of a strange deja vu. We had a similar comparison indeed on our blog, but it was well before Google Now and iOS 6 (and the improved version of Siri that came with it). Samsung's S Voice had just launched on the Galaxy S III but, honestly, the experience was less than perfect. It was more of a see-Apple-we-can-do-it-too kind of thing. Google Now has now taken over and is available on every single Android smartphone with Jelly Bean. Not only that, it's very much a part of Google's long-term plans.

Anyway, a few months ago we were less than impressed with the three different pieces of software. Slow to respond, and sometimes blatantly wrong, the virtual personal assistants just weren't up to scratch.

However, since users aren't best known for lowering their expectations, the software has evolved to offer new and better features. So, we're about to look beyond the big change logs and get some real action.

We are going to see what new tricks Apple's Siri, Google Now and Speaktoit have learned and how they can be of use in our everyday lives.

The tasks at hand are going to be as close to real-world scenarios as possible. A weather brief in the morning, pending appointments and other calendar events, the latest news, warning about flights being delayed and checking available seats for our movie of choice for the evening. These are all an essential part of an assistant's resume.

Apple Siri

Kicking off with Siri, the inner voice of the iDevices. It was introduced as one of the key software goodies in iOS 5, as a result of Apple's acquisition of the eponymous company. It has been refined since, including a substantial redesign to feel more "Apple".

At the very beginning (iOS 5) Siri was able to send texts, call contacts, update your Twitter, set reminders for you and even tell you whether it's going to rain or not.

Later on, Siri also developed an interest in sports, while restaurant and movie reviews came as an extra bonus to the overall experience. Since iOS 6, launching apps is also on the list of skills.

Apple is keen to make a point that Siri doesn't just understand what you say, but knows what you mean, as well. As a result, you can ask it indirect questions and it'll still be able answer it. In most cases it'll succeed, thanks to the large database of case scenarios that's being regularly updated.

In the cases when it doesn't understand what exactly you're on about, it reaches to WolframAlpha for answers to your question. If it's a restaurant recommendation you're after, then Yelp is the back office.

The thing with Siri is that it doesn't need you to speak like a robot in order for it to understand the meaning of the words coming out of your mouth. Asking it if you simply need to take an umbrella with you is enough for Apple's assistant to check the weather, see if it's going to rain in your area and generate a response based on the current information.

There's more to Siri than meets the eye, though. It's got that little bit of personality that you simply do not get with the other virtual personal assistants. For instance, Siri will be more than happy to tell you a joke or answer a cheeky question. As a side effect, making sly comments is also in her nature.

That's what separates Siri from the rest of the virtual personal assistant pack. Unlike the many alternatives out there, Siri isn't simply a tool that lets you do stuff. Given the chance, it'll try to put a smile on your face, while fulfilling its duties.

And it'll do so in a number of different languages. Naturally, there's support for English, but also German, Spanish, Japanese, French, Italian, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese. And while the language support is sufficiently wide many of Siri's features only work in the US and Canada.

Google Now

Not to stay too far behind Apple, Google launched its own voice solution in the summer of 2012. Google Now of course takes a slightly different approach. Instead of waiting for you to ask something, Google Now is trying to be proactive and suggests things you might be interested in in the form of cards.

The card-based user interfaces allows you to quickly scan the stuff that matters to you. Currently, Google Now offers you cards for traffic to and from work or home, a weather forecast, stocks, your favorite sports team's fixtures and even friends' birthdays.

There are a total of 25 different types of cards and Google promises that more are on the way (we suspect details to be unveiled at Google I/O 2013 in May). The more interesting among them such as Restaurant reservations, Packages, Boarding Pass and Flights require you to give Now access to your Gmail, but if you do you won't even have to ask for it to set a reminder for you. Once you get an email confirming your booking it will automatically put it in your schedule.

Google Now even knows approximately where you are (if you allow it to sniff around, of course) and suggests things for you to do. For example, if you're away from home, Google Now will kindly suggest some tourist attractions for you to visit. And it will always keep you updated on the time it will take you to arrive home in the current traffic conditions.

In order to fully enjoy the power of Google Now, you'll have to grant it access to your Google search history. This way, for example, it'll alert of upcoming events near you (concerts of your favorite band for example).

Make no mistake about it, Google Now is as tightly integrated in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean as Apple's Siri is in iOS - you can access it from anywhere in the user interface (the access method is different for different OEMs, but rarely involves more than a couple of taps).

Tapping the microphone button in Google Now allows you to not only place a search query but also boss your phone around. You can set alarms, add calendar events, place phone calls and send text messages or get navigated using Google Maps.

For trivial search queries like currency and unit conversions, looking for famous people or places and notable events, Google harnesses the power of its Knowledge Graph - a service for gathering information from a wide range of sources to show you what you want to know.

The voice search feature of Google Now is part of the Google Search app and supports a much wider array of languages (nearly 40) than Siri. The search giant is constantly adding new languages and updating the already existing ones with new features such as dictation and search functionality. However, the cards in Google Now don't support the full range of languages just yet