Samsung’s S-Voice, how does it compare with Siri? [video]

Samsung’s Galaxy S3 includes a range of new features including S-Voice, its rival to Apple’s Siri. We take a closer look to see how it performs.

For a look at some of the other features in the smartphone, read our first look of the Samsung Galaxy S3.

What’s different about S-Voice?

1. It understands eight different languages
   S-Voice supports eight different languages including British and American English, Italian, Spanish, German and Korean.
2. It doesn’t have trouble with accents
   The S3 is very good at understanding what is being said, regardless of accents - possibly due to the multilingual nature of the software.
3. You can snooze the alarm by simply saying ‘snooze’
   This could potentially be a really useful feature and means that you wouldn’t have to scramble around in the dark for your phone. You can also unlock the phone by saying ‘Hi Galaxy’, although we’re not sure this will feel quite as natural as saying snooze.
4. It doesn’t work with location services, yet
   At the moment it isn’t possible to use S-Voice to find the nearest restaurant or to ask similar location-based questions. Samsung couldn’t confirm if this is something that would be added at a later date but it seems a shame not to include this kind of functionality.

Samsung has also made other improvements to the Galaxy S3. Watch our videos looking at how the S3 compares with the S2, the camera in the Galaxy S3 and the new S Voice feature.

Jon’s impressions – how does it compare with Siri?

We were only able to briefly try out this feature and we’re still not totally sure  just what functions it will be able to perform. For example, it wasn’t able to perform location-based tasks such as finding the nearest restaurant or train station and Samsung were unable to confirm if this would become available later.

However we were very impressed with the ease with which it understood what was being said – regardless of the persons accent – and in this regard it seemed to perform better than Siri. This is a very important feature for voice recognition as no-one wants to look silly repeatedly telling their phone what to do.

I’m still not convinced how useful voice recognition – outside situations like using it in a car – and I don’t think it’s something people are going to use everyday.

I also think it’s going to be important for Samsung to manage people’s expectations. Apple got in trouble for making it look like Siri could do lots of things that weren’t possible in the UK and we’re still not sure what S Voice will and will not be able to do.

It’s impossible to say which is the better service as we’ve spent so little time using S-Voice – but once the Samsung Galaxy S3 goes on sale we’ll put the two head to head in a direct competition to find the winner.

More on this…

• Samsung Galaxy S3 first look review – read our first impressions of the smartphone
• Apple iPhone 4S review – the iPhone put to the test in our labs
• Which? mobile phone reviews – see how the latest models performed in our tests