Apple generally adopts technologies later than others so they could build on top of others learnings; things here was the exact opposite where they started years before others, and ended up paving the way to allow others to build better products based on their learnings.
Google Voice Actions for Android released in 2010, well before Siri did. Voice search as an in-browser function on the website in summer 2011, and even had a phone number for people to call in with Google queries by voice. From what I remember, Google’s speech to text recognition was much, much better than Siri’s at launch, and the gap only widened over time.
And then Google Now in 2012 was the version that started having fuzzy smart functionality, where it would link things together as an “assistant.” The then-Google-owned Motorola released its Moto X in 2013 with an always-listening touchless trigger word for Google Now functionality.
It always sucked tbh, but I think what the OP meant is that when it came out, it was understandable that it was very limited and not good, yet still innovative and interesting. Apple just never really improved it beyond that.
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