While Loup Ventures found the HomePod to be the best-sounding smartspeaker on the market, its inquiry also found the device’s Siri responses to be the worst of the pack for correctly answering questions. Siri on the HomePod only answered 52.3 percent of queries correctly, a sharp drop off from Google Home’s 81 percent success rate and even behind Alexa’s 64 percent and Cortana’s 57 percent. While Siri understood most of the questions (99.4 percent), the AI only got about half of them right. Siri shined in answering questions about local retail locations and where to buy certain products, but doesn’t support the questions about navigation directions, calendar dates, email and calling features that are offered with other smartspeaker assistants.
Those limits are only imposed on HomePod, so if Siri on that device was brought up to the standard it can meet on iOS, the accuracy rate would be increased to 67 percent—allowing the device to stand ahead of Alexa and Cortana but still well behind Google Home. But even though Siri’s usefulness is limited, the HomePod has some features that make it more accessible, particularly the ability to hear a user asking Siri a question in a normal speaking voice even with loud music playing. Siri also has a smoother, more human voice on the HomePod than it does on the iPhone and avoids repeating the entire inquiry back like Google Assistant and Alexa, making for a more organic experience.