Siri Who? Google Gemini App Comes to iPhones

iPhone users wondering what Apple Intelligence might become in a few months don’t have to look far or need to own the latest iPhones to see what the hubbub is about. On Thursday, Google launched the Gemini app on iOS, bringing the company’s chatbot and Gemini Live to your Apple phones for conversational AI. You can use it now, and if you’re still not impressed, then you probably shouldn’t hold out much hope for supersized Siri coming next year.

The Google app on iOS already integrated Gemini, and you can still access Google’s chatbot and Imagen AI image generator through the widget on your homescreen or the website. However, the big boon for iPhone users is they now have access to Gemini Live, Google’s much-hyped “live speech” conversational AI. The Mountain View, California tech giant made the service free last month, and you don’t need to pay for Gemini Advanced to get it, for now. You can access the feature through the small three-bar and sparkle icon at the bottom of the app screen.

The UI lets you pick from 10 varieties of voices (before inevitably landing on the British-sounding one), and you’ll be able to talk more naturally to your phone to get answers to your queries. You can interrupt the chatbot mid-sentence and berate it all you want, and the AI can still follow the conversation thread.

There are a few things to note about Gemini Live. It currently does not connect to your Google Workspace apps, like Drive or Gmail, as the Gemini app already can. While speaking, you won’t be able to read your conversation until you end the session. The chatbot is good at keeping pace but may occasionally get hung up over certain phrases or stop mid-statement, requiring further prompting. You can get some rudimentary step-by-step guides for recipes or simple tasks like crafting a template for the family holiday card.

© Gif: Google

If you’re like me, you’ll come away impressed with the natural-sounding voice and delivery, but the content still has much to be desired. I can ask the AI about specific panels at the upcoming Pax Unplugged convention in December, but it refused to offer many specifics and instead just told me to go on the website for more. You also shouldn’t trust the AI’s answers without question. This week, an AI chatbot on Facebook was willing to offer a recipe for cooking an incredibly poisonous mushroom. I asked Gemini Live the same question, and while it routinely told me it recommends “consulting with a mushroom expert to make sure it’s safe,” it didn’t have any compunction giving me a barebones technique for mushroom stroganoff with “blushing earthstar” mushrooms (hint: do not do this).

Simply put, the AI isn’t intelligent and shouldn’t be treated as such. Gemini itself is better for searching through your emails instead of looking through multiple pages for that one dinner reservation. If you regularly use Docs, Drive, or Sheets, Gemini can prove pretty handy if all you need is finding lost documents or filling out spreadsheets.

This app may show us where Apple hopes to go with Siri. Apple has said its Apple Intelligence suite will work between apps, so you can pull information from your Mail and make it into an event in Calendar all with a single text or voice prompt. So far, Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 offers some barebones and often hilarious notification and email summaries. Apple also has features like Image Playground and ChatGPT integration, which work in the iOS 18.2 developer beta.

My experience with Apple Intelligence, the latest MacBook Pros with M4, and iPhone 16 has been lackluster. ChatGPT through macOS or iOS offers very little information on any query, and you’re better off simply doing a regular Google search. The true promise of an AI-ified Siri won’t arrive until early 2025.