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People shouldn't underestimate Google here. I'm not a fan (not for a decade ... Reader still stings amongst many other missteps), but I'm constantly impressed by how much better their Assistant, translation and speech-to-text stuff is versus things like Siri, etc. Almost as if Google handles the larger dataset that it has access to in a much better way than the other companies. I wouldn't bet against them doing that again here.

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To me they seem to be beaten at all of those areas. DeepL does translations much better than Google Translate (for the four languages I know and speak regularly), Siri does speech-to-text (and text-to-spech) better and so on.

The only thing Google really beats the competition on is Android Auto, which is miles ahead of CarPlay. CarPlay still covers the entire screen when there is an incoming call, so good luck seeing your turn-by-turn directions if you happen to be navigating.

Google products to me are the definition of mediocrity. They're "designed by committee" and play it safe, they're probably "good enough" for most people, but they're certainly not the best in class. As you noted Google Translate pales in comparison to DeepL, Google's TTS are worse than similar offerings from Amazon/AWS, let alone more niche focused products like Voicepeak, and you know that they're phoning it in for search given that there's a startup (Kagi) whose sole value proposiion is to use Google's own API then rerank results to achieve much better results.

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