When OpenAI made ChatGPT available last month for testing purposes, there wasn’t too much hype around it because, for people, it was just an improved version of Instruct GPT, another NLP model developed by OpenAI that wasn’t too successful.
However, things have changed a lot since then, as people in the AI industry have been blown away by its ability to converse like a real human being and answer many questions that can only be answered by a human. It has quickly garnered more than a million users within its testing phase, which is a big-bang success story by any standards.
In such a situation, it’s natural that people are comparing it with mainstream AI-based voice assistants like Alexa or Siri and wondering if it’s better than them. We’re going to answer this question for you in this article. We’ll explore everything – how ChatGPT is different from voice assistants, how it is better, and where it falls short. Let’s start!
Key Takeaway
ChatGPT is a fantastic AI assistant for answering long queries and doing other tasks that can’t be done by Alexa or Siri. Its use cases are different from Alexa or Siri, and it excels in all of them far more than any other AI-based voice assistant.
#1. ChatGPT vs Alexa And Siri: The Difference
Before we can see how and why ChatGPT is better than voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, it’s important to take a look at some of the key differences between both. Here they’re:
- Siri and Alexa can interact with the physical world and complete actions on other apps/devices, while ChatGPT can’t do any of that (at least for now). That’s because it has been designed to provide more detailed and comprehensive answers to a wide spectrum of questions.
- Siri and Alexa have more applications in our day-to-day lives, while ChatGPT is meant more for business-related use cases (again, for now, at least).
These two differences make ChatGPT a quite different kind of AI assistant than Alexa or Siri, and also defines what ChatGPT does better and where it lags behind these voice assistants. It can definitely not play songs for you, turn off the lights in your room or call your janitor when you’re in the office, but it can certainly help you complete the work you do in your office much faster than Alexa or Siri.
In the sections given below, we shall explore this core competency in greater detail.
#2. Ownership And Privacy
The first thing that makes ChatGPT better than Alexa or Siri is its ownership. While Alexa and Siri are owned by two of the biggest corporate giants (Amazon and Apple), ChatGPT is the brainchild of OpenAI, which is a non-profit organization. Being a non-profit, they’re not under constant pressure to maximize their revenue and earnings, so they’re far less likely to trade your data with advertisers for revenue generation.
This means greater data privacy than Alexa and Siri and more control over the storage of your data. In fact, ChatGPT conversations can be easily deleted with the click of a “Clear Conversation” button after you have got the help you needed. There is no chat history, and therefore your data is used only for as long as you wish. These things give ChatGPT a clear edge over Siri and Alexa when it comes to data ownership and privacy.
#3. Factual Accuracy
Any AI assistant is only as good as it’s accurate. And when we’re dealing with an assistant that has been designed for office work, it becomes even more important!
The good news here is that ChatGPT is quite accurate with whatever it can do for now. Not only it can generate human-like responses without any sort of grammatical errors, but also it can tweak its responses if you tweak your questions to provide you with more precise answers than Alexa or Siri, as you can see below.
Its accuracy is maintained even when you ask a follow-up question linked to a question that you already asked – an area where Siri and Alexa still fall short sometimes. You don’t need to make your questions unnecessarily longer to squeeze all the info in one question, and you also don’t need to keep repeating the topic, subject, or object of the question to get an accurate answer. ChatGPT understands the context of conversation and answers accordingly, just as a human would!
This sort of accuracy and fluency is the result of training the ChatGPT model on a larger database. It has been trained on a much larger database of words than Alexa or Siri, which has made it far more conversational and accurate.
#4. Conversation Fluency
As we said above, conversations with ChatGPT sound exactly like conversations with a human being. Not only the answers are thorough and error-free but also they are in quite a fluent language. While Alexa and Siri are also quite fluent in their answers, they can’t give as long responses as ChatGPT with an equal level of fluency.
This difference is, and it’s likely to remain because ChatGPT has been designed from the outset to handle long conversations with ease. That’s embedded into its design, unlike Siri and Alexa which were designed initially to perform small day-to-day tasks which don’t require long responses and are now being tweaked to add the capability of giving longer responses when needed.
#5. Use Cases
As we said in the beginning, ChatGPT is meant for an altogether different kind of use case than Alexa or Siri, and those use cases are precisely the areas in which it beats Alexa and Siri hands down. They include the following, in ChatGPT’s own words:
Do you see that? ChatGPT can be used to build human-like AI chatbots, content creation platforms, content recommendation tools, translation tools, etc. Siri and Alexa would fare very poorly in all these use cases when compared to ChatGPT. And since we already have 3 major personal assistants to help with similar tasks (Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant all are on the same spectrum), an assistant like ChatGPT which does something different was much needed.
In addition to that, ChatGPT users have also said that it can do some tasks that are pretty much impossible for Alexa and Siri. Those tasks include:
- Helping in writing code for software and web development
- Explaining complex subjects in laymen’s terms
- Writing college assignments like essays
- Writing cover letters for job applications.
Can you think about Alexa or Siri doing any of these tasks without messing up? We can’t!
Related Read:
- Jasper Chat Review
- How To Do Keyword Research Using ChatGPT?
- ChatGPT Chatbot: How To Use This AI Chatbot
- Chatbot Statistics
Wrapping Up: ChatGPT vs Alexa and Siri
Overall we can say that ChatGPT is a far better AI assistant than Alexa or Siri when you need help with serious office work. It can answer questions in detail, converse like a real human being and save you a ton of time by eliminating the need to do research, write, and answer queries manually.
Over time as it evolves and gets smarter, its use cases will increase, and eventually, we may also find it better at interacting with the physical world. Till then, you can utilize it for your official work without any hesitation.
FAQs:
You don’t need anything specific to use ChatGPT except for a web browser and a computer. As long as you have them, you can go to this link, sign up with an account and try ChatGPT.
As of now, it’s totally free to use as it’s in the testing phase. But reports have suggested that once it’s released publicly, OpenAI may put it behind a paywall.
ChatGPT is currently in the testing phase, so your conversations will be used to fine-tune the responses of this model. However, if you want your conversations to be deleted, then you can submit a request using this form.
At the moment, ChatGPT is in the testing phase so it doesn’t have any API that can be used to integrate it with 3rd party apps.
