Now that official devices running both these services are in the wild, its time to compare them side-by-side and see which (if either) you might actually want to use.
To make a voice control app the kind of thing youd ever actually use, it has to be fast. When I first started using S Voice on a Galaxy S3, I was satisfied with the speed of the translations. It might have felt a little sluggish on some queries, but it wasnt until I had hands on with Google Now that I realized how much time I was wasting with S Voice.
Google Now is transcribing the voice into text locally using the new engine in Jelly Bean. The text is then uploaded to do the search, which is very fast. S Voice is probably sending the actual audio to the cloud to be transcribed. It might also have its own local voice processing engine, but if thats the case, its very slow. I doubt the quad-core chip in the Nexus 7 is giving it any advantages. The individual cores in the Snapdragon-packing Galaxy S3 are faster, and Google Now is just as snappy on the dual-core Galaxy Nexus.
The quality of the recognition is definitely better on Google Now, too. In the video above, there were a few times when S Voice just missed words, like Chrome and Wombat, that Google Now understood perfectly. More common words seem to work fine in S Voice, but I constantly feel the need to enunciate more clearly when using it.
S Voice does have more ability to reach out into the Android system apps. It can pull in upcoming appointments when asked, send Twitter messages, and control the hardware radios. Google Now displays a message that insinuates the ability to control settings will be added later, but nothing of the sort is happening at this time. Some of that other data is displayed as cards in the main Now interface; it’s just not integrated into voice search.
The two apps could also not look more different. S Voice displays your questions and the corresponding answers as a conversation in word bubbles. It feels a little too much like Siri. Google Now takes searches one at a time and shows you information in large, well-designed tiles that are pulled from Googles Knowledge Graph.The main differentiating factor between these services at this time is availability. The Samsung Galaxy S3 is available on a huge number of carriers, and it will work just as well no matter where you get the device. Google Now is very new, and exclusive to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. You can get it on the Nexus 7, or on the GSM Galaxy Nexus.
I hope that Samsung leaves Google Now and its associated voice search intact when the Galaxy S3 is eventually bumped up to Jelly Bean. Still, I wouldnt be surprised to see Samsung ditch Google Now for TouchWiz — it trounces S Voice even at this early stage, and that can’t be great for the ego.
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