Study shows Siri is more widely used in the United States

Jun 11, 2016 15:12 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has worked a lot on making Cortana a better digital assistant on Windows devices, but it seems that, at least in the United States, these efforts are yet to pay off.

A study conducted by Creative Strategies shows that no less than 72 percent of the Americans have never used Cortana, despite the fact that Microsoft’s assistant is currently available on both phones and PCs.

And yet, such news might not surprise many. Cortana on the desktop is still a new thing, and not everyone is willing to use it, given the fact that it asks for location and other private information that might not make sense to provide on a PC, and US adoption of Windows Phone has always been low. The latest data provided by Kantar indicated that Windows Phone market share in the United States was 2.7 percent in March 2016, a drop of 1.6 percent versus the same month the year before.

Siri a lot more successful

On the other hand, only 21 percent of the participants in the study said they never used Siri while 34 percent admitted they didn’t try Google’s personal assistant.

What’s more, when it comes to iOS users alone, just 2 percent of the customers stated that they never used Siri, while in Google’s case, 4 percent of Android users weren’t interested in a digital assistant. As for Windows Phone, the company says that the number of Windows Phone users participating in the study was too small, and such statistics could not be determined.

Another interesting fact revealed by the study is that while usage of digital assistants is growing, most mobile phone owners prefer to use them at home or in cars. Only 6 percent of them talk to a digital assistant in public because “they feel uncomfortable talking to their technology” when someone else is around.

“With public usage as low as 3% for iPhone users, it seems users are still uncomfortable talking to their devices. Even more fascinating is this happens in the US where consumers are accustomed to talking loudly on phones in public,” the study shows.

Despite all these figures, Microsoft’s most recent statistics have shown that Cortana adoption is growing, and the assistant has already answered billions of questions since its launch on the PC. For the moment, however, such technologies are more useful on the go, and with Windows Phone losing ground in many markets, Cortana still has a hard time gaining more users.

Thanks for the tip, albert94!