Google Just Flexed Two Hours of AI Features While Apple Prepares to Pay Google to Fix Siri

Yesterday at Google I/O, the search giant spent nearly two hours talking about new AI features during its opening keynote. Which isn’t actually new for Google. This has been the topic of Google I/O for a few years now. And it really seems like Google is winning the consumer AI race. But we can’t help but draw comparisons to Apple.

Siri launched 15 years ago on the iPhone 4S. It beat Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa, every other personal assistant you can imagine, and it still hasn’t changed. The only thing that has changed is its UI, it’s still pretty useless. Which is absolutely insane when you think about it. Apple could have had a huge lead here, but instead, they squandered it. Something that Samsung might be doing with their foldable lead, actually.

In fact, Siri is so bad that the new version of Siri that was supposed to launch last year is only set to launch in a beta this Summer after WWDC. That’s a pretty long wait for an update that should have rolled out years ago.

Meanwhile, Google is rolling out AI features left and right

Yesterday, Google announced a ton of new AI features. Most of these, everyday users aren’t going to use much, or at all. But there are some legitimately great features that Google is rolling out. Particularly in Search and Shopping. Google can now track prices for you, help you build a PC, all without having to leave Google Shopping.

Then there’s Ask YouTube, where you can ask questions and it’ll show you videos that answer your query, making it easier than ever to find tutorials for different things. I know I use YouTube a ton to find out how to do different things, so this is going to be very helpful.

But if you try to ask Siri for the date, there’s a 50/50 chance it might get that wrong.

Of course, Google’s AI is not perfect. You can still trip it up quite easily, like asking if next year is 2027. However, Google is much further along than Apple is when it comes to AI. And that’s likely why Apple is using Gemini for its upcoming AI features.

Apple partnering with Google for Gemini Intelligence was a smart move

It’s been rumored that Apple is partnering with Google to power a lot of the Apple Intelligence features on the iPhone, as well as Siri. Apple already tried to partner with OpenAI for ChatGPT integration. But what they’re finding with that current setup is that most iPhone users will just open up the ChatGPT app to get things done, versus using Siri to then go to ChatGPT.

The difference with Gemini here is that it will be powering the back-end of Siri. So there won’t be a handoff taking you to Gemini for different tasks for Siri. This is not the case currently with ChatGPT.

Of course, we’ll hear more about this at WWDC next month when Apple introduces the new version of all of its operating systems, including iOS 27.

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