I tried the same test.

Google got the translation right first try, and the first result, which returned in less than a second, had "over $20 billion in damage" visible.

Siri took ~8 seconds to return "Ok sports fans, the Hurricanes appear to be in first place in the Southeast right now" followed by AHL team standings.

Apple has a lot of catching up to do here. They're going to have to start translating client-side, which Google has obviously figured out, and they're going to need a data source as rich as Google. It think the first part will get done at some point, but how will they match Google on the data side?

They won't. They can't.

It's important to remember that Apple is a hardware company with a software habit. Google is a software company.

While I understand why Apple hates Google so much, I think breaking with Google is a mistake. Nobody can beat Google at software; Apple hardware + Google software is a wonderful combination, and if the two companies worked together we'd really see the apex of user experience.

The hardware/software split is too simplistic a view. The companies have their various strengths and weaknesses. For example, the graphics stack on iOS embarrasses Android's. It took how many years and how many hardware advances before flagship Android got scrolling as smooth as the first iPhone?

Another example: Google released Renderscript in early 2011 (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-r...) only to deprecate it a little over a year later (https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.1.htm...). We can cherry pick examples all day long, but the bottom line is that each company excels at certain things.

It's interesting how Samsung is basically stuck to Google at this point. I'm sure they'd love to switch to their own Bada or Android fork and capture more of the profit, but Samsung is absolutely abysmal at software.

Google is a data company and its design approach is data-driven; whereas Apple is a design company and its data approach is design-driven.

False. Apple is a software company. If you've ever had to develop any non-trivial smartphone application, you would see how the iOS SDK is lightyears ahead of Android's.

Apple is a software company (who also fuses design and software really well). Google is a computer science company.

We'd be better off in a world with no Android, where RIM still hasn't shipped a modern smartphone OS, and with a Windows Mobile/Phone environment that has broken application compatibility twice in the past two years?

I'm 90% sure this is an example of Poe's Law (that it is impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and a parody of extremism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law).

But it is worth remembering the various ideas that iOS "borrowed" from Android (or the improvements Android forced iOS to make) - including decent notifications, wireless syncing, multitasking, etc. Google for more.

Apple (and everyone) improves more rapidly with a viable competitor.

It's incredibly myopic to argue that the mobile landscape would be better off without Android providing a compelling competitive force.

What makes you think that iPhone would be as good as it is if it wasn't fighting for customers who can get other smartphones?

Interesting that Apple - the device company - opted to do the recognition on the server and Google - the cloud company - chose to do it on the device.

I'm pretty sure Google is doing most of it on the server as well. Why do you think otherwise?

The sheer speed of it.

Maybe I'm wrong but I'm getting near instant voice recognition off a poor wifi connection linking to a slow internet connection.

It is, indeed, on the server (at least on my Galaxy Nexus). It won't work if you turn the connection off. Maybe they have some sort of hybrid, though, because it does have offline recognition that can call people without a net connection.

They do both, so it'll work totally offline, but it's better online and can utilise the two together seamlessly.

Because you can do a local search offline. (at least on the Android version)

On Android, voice recognition is built-in to the OS. On iPhone, they don't have this luxury and the app is relatively small, so I'm thinking almost all of it is done on the server. A link to a Google source verifying this would be nice though.

This was exactly my experience. My iPhone struggled to understand me at times (albeit only 2 out of 20 times) - but the Nexus S (a fairly old phone) understood me 20 out of 20 times. It really whipped the pants off Apple - I was quite surprised. To see so many posts above say that Google Voice was far below par of Apple was a surprise to me. Note: I haven't tested IOS6 yet, so things may be different.

How do we know that Google is translating client-side? Is there a link to a Google source to verify this? The app is only 10 MB, so it would be very impressive if they actually accomplished this, but I can't find verification anywhere.

For current events, Google will always have the lead here. They have the full weight of all the searches that are being performed around the globe at any second.