“Find me a decent coffee shop where I can sit and get work done?” I uttered into my iPhone’s mic.
“I’ll need to use ChatGPT to write that.” That was Siri’s response in my interaction with Apple’s voice assistant just over a week ago. Google’s Gemini assistant helped me the way I expected it to.
Soon, Gemini will extend that convenience to iPhones and fill the functional gaps where Siri is faltering. As part of Google’s blockbuster search monopoly trial, CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned during the court proceedings that a deal with Apple to bring Gemini on iPhones could happen in the coming months.
“Pichai said he held a series of conversations with Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook across 2024 and he hopes to have a deal done by the middle of this year,” says a Bloomberg report.
What’s the current situation?
Google is in the process of transitioning Google Assistant and replacing it across the board with Gemini, from Android phones and Chromebooks to Wear OS wearables. The shift is historical because Gemini is capable of accomplishing far more than Google Assistant.
From conducting deep research and getting work done across different apps to analyzing files and generating original content across the entire Workspace suite, Gemini is the biggest evolution for virtual assistants. Amazon has pulled off something similar with the Alexa+ assistant.
Siri, on the other hand, has sorely missed the AI trends, despite being an early trendsetter. The situation was grim enough that Apple inked a deal with OpenAI to let ChatGPT fill some of those gaps. For queries that Siri can’t handle, it offloads them to ChatGPT.
From Writing Tools to assisting users with general knowledge-based queries, ChatGPT takes over. The integration is not seamless, however, and there are still a handful of areas where iPhone users need to open the ChatGPT app because Siri’s native interface can’t perform those tasks.
Why does the Google deal matter?
Once a deal between Google and Apple is in place, Gemini will lend a helping hand to Siri, just the way ChatGPT is currently deployed as part of the Apple Intelligence stack. Think of it as picking a default app, such as Chrome for browsing, but for AI assistants on your iPhone.
Now, this won’t be the first time we have heard of Gemini making its way to iPhones as a native integration. Following WWDC last year, a senior Apple executive, Craig Federighi, hinted that the company was ultimately hoping to build a system where users could pick the AI model of their choice, and even namedropped Gemini.
In the months that followed, news of Google’s conversations with Apple kept popping up. Earlier this year, a code sleuth spotted the mention of Gemini appearing as a system-level option for enabling it within Apple’s codebase. In the wake of Pichai’s comments, it seems a Gemini integration for Siri and Apple Intelligence will be announced at the WWDC conference in June.
Gemini is already available for iPhone users, but you can only access it by opening the mobile app or by setting up home and lock screen widgets. I have extensively pushed this non-native approach, and it’s already far more rewarding than Siri. Even newbies like Perplexity iOS Voice Assistant are functionally more advanced than Siri.
I am hoping that once Gemini is integrated within iOS, users will be able to enable it natively by invoking Siri. For all the tasks that Siri can’t accomplish, Gemini will take over and perform those chores on Apple devices. It’s a stopgap solution at best, until Apple is able to put Siri back in the innovation spotlight.
