Every Android fan should root for Siri to get better

For the longest time now, Apple’s Siri has been the butt of the smart assistant joke, and even more so when ChatGPT and Gemini started making their mark in our digital lives — answering more than basic questions or helping with more than simple queries. The first rollout of Apple Intelligence, a couple of years ago, was a fiasco, and we had to wait until this year — and a collaboration with Google — to see Siri resurface and pretend to be useful again.

As Android fans, though, we always find it easy to snicker about Apple’s shortcomings, and perhaps even enjoy the company’s stumbles while Gemini gained trick after trick. But this time, I think we should all root for Apple’s latest Siri endeavors to be successful.

Competition is good for Google and Android

For two years now, Google has faced real AI competition only from ChatGPT. While other services — like Claude, Perplexity, or Copilot — exist and have their fans, they don’t come close to the widespread use and availability of both Gemini and ChatGPT. On phones, specifically, where most of us do our daily computing, the two services have become synonymous with AI. What hasn’t been synonymous with AI is Siri.

Apple’s first efforts were laughable, so much so that I’ve had iPhone users ask me about Pixels and Android because they just don’t want to live “behind the times,” as they aptly put it. When I explained how Gemini can help me understand documents I’m checking out, answer questions about YouTube videos I’m watching, check my screen as I scroll through a long page while replying to my queries about what I’m seeing, among other use cases, they were dumbstruck by how bad Siri is in comparison.

But with Apple adopting Google’s model to improve its own AI and Siri’s implementation, things are about to change, and for the better. Competition has stalled in the on-device AI game; most Android makers, including Google, are just adding random features to flex their AI chops, not for the benefit of users.

Who cares if I can use Gemini Nano to make images of a place from Google Maps? That’s not moving the needle in my daily life. And no, I don’t want to recreate memories with my loved ones who weren’t there by adding them through AI. The last time a friend of mine couldn’t join me on a trip, I took a photo of myself holding a printout of his face. It took time, was intentional, and was endearing, which is the whole point of a gesture like this. The point is that Google is stuck doing things with Gemini just because it can, and competition from a company that usually concentrates its efforts on the user experience, like Apple, is more than welcome.

Siri is already doing some things better than Gemini

A lot of what the new AI-powered version of Siri offers is familiar to us, Android and Gemini users. Storing conversations, continuous chats, on-screen overlays, better dictation and writing, and personalization and contextual answers — all of these are perks I’ve enjoyed on my Pixel 10 Pro XL for months, if not a year or longer.

But Apple stepped a bit outside of Google’s path to provide features that I haven’t seen on Gemini yet. The ability to change Siri’s pace and expressivity is unique, and something I wish I had to tailor Gemini’s voice to what I want. Other features have been made way more seamless or frictionless by Apple, like on-screen awareness, which doesn’t require you to tap the button to ask about what’s on your screen.

Apple has also leveraged its entire service ecosystem and everything it knows about you from Messages, Calendar, Notes, and Photos to boost its intelligence. For example, Call Context seems like a better version of the very capricious Magic Cue. Matching answers in a conversation or email thread to the exact recipient based on your previous chat/mail history is another example of an AI that works for you, and not for a general “formal” or “casual” audience. I’m also immensely jealous of the new ability to describe an automation in natural language and have Siri create a Shortcut for it — not just because it works that way, but because Apple’s Shortcuts remains the one feature I wish Android would offer.

On my personal Apple-envy scale, however, nothing comes close to Apple’s Spotlight indexing of in-app content. Of course, this is contingent on iOS developers adopting it, but Apple is already well-poised to convince devs to join in. Google has tried and failed to implement phone-wide in-app search for years now. There was a time when I could search Spotify, Google Maps, my contacts, my Todoist tasks, and a few other apps directly from the Google search bar on my phone. But developers ignored that feature, then Google killed it, and although there’s a skeleton of it now in the Pixel Launcher’s search bar, it’s barely useful.

All of these are features I want Google to “copy” from Apple soon. They’re the reason I want Siri to be successful, too, because the more Apple pushes into less-gimmicky, more useful day-to-day features, the more Google will have to match and surpass them. After all, it’s the one providing the models, so it should have the AI expertise to push the envelope more than Apple, right?