14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has pushed hard to make Cortana more widely adopted, but statistics published as part of a research conducted by measurement firm Verto Analytics show that Apple’s Siri continues to be number one in the United States with no less than 41.4 million monthly unique users.
Cortana is far behind with just 0.7 million monthly users, though Microsoft’s assistant has improved from 0.2 million the same period of the previous year. Cortana, however, tripled its user engagement from 19 percent to no less than 60 percent.
There’s a big reason for the difference between Siri and Cortana (Samsung’s S Voice is the runner-up in the chart with 23.2 million users): the research only analyzed mobile usage and not desktops, and given the market share different between iPhones and Windows phones, it’s not surprising to see Apple getting the better rating.
According to the same stats, the average time spent using Siri every month dropped from 39 minutes to 14 minutes, while Cortana actually improved to a record 2 hours and 31 minutes. This means users find Cortana a lot more engaging, close to Google’s Allo with 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Google’s assistant currently has 1 million monthly unique users according to the stats, while Amazon’s Alexa has increased to no less than 2.6 million users.
The desktop battle
On the other hand, while Microsoft could win on the desktop thanks to the market share of Windows, Apple is also offering Siri on the desktop. Also, it’s not a secret that many PC users disable Cortana in the first place, more or less impacting the adoption of Microsoft’s digital assistant overall.
But even if Siri is leading the charts, the stats show that usage actually dropped from the same month the previous year by no less than 15 percent or 7.3 million monthly users.
Both Microsoft and Apple are betting big on their digital assistants, and the two companies are already working on a series of updates for future versions of their operating system. Microsoft, for example, is reportedly preparing a new home for Cortana, as the assistant could be moved from the taskbar to the system tray for a less intrusive behavior.
The research was conducted on 20,000 US consumers between May 2016 and May 2017 and also involved consumer survey data.
