A recent study of virtual mobile assistants found that Google Now comes out on top.

The Stone Temple Consulting Corporation pit Apple's Siri, Google Search (which encompasses Google Now), and Microsoft's Cortana against each other to test their skills.

The research firm, in order to measure performance, compared all three platforms with 3,086 different queries. The "knowledge panel" attempts to find direct answers to questions asked in a search.

Stone Temple's Eric Enge wrote: "This is clear evidence that Google is much further down the path with this type of work than either Apple or Cortana."

The results showed that Google Now returns twice as many results as Cupertino's service, and nearly three times that of Cortana.

Enge wrote: "As of Oct. 4, Google Now has a clear lead in terms of the sheer volume of queries addressed, and more complete accuracy with its queries than either Siri or Cortana."