Google Gemini is already winning the wars for next-generation assistants

One of the most critical changes in Samsung’s novel phones is uncomplicated: when you long press the phone’s side button, instead of activating Samsung’s own Bixby assistant by default, you get Google Gemini.

This is probably a good thing. Bixby has never been a very good virtual assistant – Samsung originally created it primarily to aid you navigate your device’s settings, not to get information from the Internet. It has since improved and can now perform standard assistant tasks such as visual searches and setting timers, but it has never managed to catch up with the likes of Alexa, Google Assistant and now even Siri. So if you are a Samsung user, this is good news! Your assistant is probably better now. (And if for some unknown reason you really love Bixby, don’t worry: there’s still an app.)

The move to Gemini is an even bigger deal for Google. Google was blindsided by the launch of ChatGPT a few years ago, but has caught up. According to latest news from Wall Street JournalCEO Sundar Pichai currently believes that Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT and wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. Might just get one Samsung phone there at a time.

Gemini is now a central feature of the world’s most popular Android phones, and millions of people are likely to start using it more often – or using it at all – now that it’s so readily available. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of each of its products, this means an incredibly critical novel set of users and interactions. All of this data makes Gemini better, which makes it more useful, which makes it more popular. Which makes it better again.

Right now, Google appears to be well ahead of its competitors in one critical respect: Gemini is currently the most powerful virtual assistant on the market, although it’s not particularly close. It’s not that Gemini is particularly great; he simply has more access to more information and more users than anyone else. This race is still in its early stages and NO The AI ​​product is still very good, but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get good really quickly. This worked so well in search that it got Google in trouble with antitrust law. This time, at least for now, it looks like it will be even easier for Google to take over the market.

Over the years, there have been three significant players in the virtual assistant space. Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri offered similar features and were similarly accessible through speakers, phones, and wearables. But now? The wildly popular first AI-powered “Alexa Extraordinary” is, by all accounts, much delayed and much weaker. The latest versions of Siri come with crazier animations and don’t seem to include any novel smarts or capabilities.

There are, of course, other AI assistants on the rise. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have sturdy base models, and some have the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are many good reasons to choose them, and even something like Surprise over the Twins. However, they lack the most critical thing: distribution. These are apps that you need to download, log in and open every time. Gemini is a button you can push – and that makes a substantial difference. There’s a reason why OpenAI is supposedly working on everything from a web browser to the ChatGPT gadget designed by Jony Ive: built-in options usually win.

Built-in options are also the ones that provide the best integration across the entire platform, which can span the entire game. Gemini can already change your phone’s settings, and with novel updates it can even do things across apps – to name just one example, capturing information from email and putting it into a draft text message. Due to the architecture of iOS and Android, no other assistant has this access – and again, there’s no indication that Siri will ever be as good as it should be. If the future of assistants is the agent-like experience of using apps for yourself, Google’s inherent advantage may prove insurmountable.

Meanwhile, Google is practically spoiled for places to place a Gemini. The company recently announced that all paying Workspace customers will receive access to Gemini. You can access Gemini with one click from your Gmail inbox or summon it with one keystroke in Docs. And the underlying technology is even more ubiquitous. You can employ Gemini to find things on YouTube and Drive, and virtually every time you search, Gemini’s AI-powered Overview appears at the top of the results. “Today, all seven of our products and platforms with over two billion monthly users use Gemini models,” Pichai said last fall on Google’s earnings call. (Fun fact: the word “twins” appears 29 times in the earnings call transcript, just three fewer times than “search.”)

However, when it comes to how people actually encounter and interact with these models, the phone is still the AI ​​device of choice. And this is where Google perhaps has the biggest advantage. “Gemini’s deep integration improves Android,” Pichai said on an earnings call. “For example, Gemini Live allows you to chat freely with Gemini; people love it.” For now, smartphones are the most attractive AI devices, and Google can integrate its systems like no other. Apple, in an attempt to catch up with the iPhone, had to make an awkward call to ChatGPT so that Siri could answer more questions.

All of these assistants, including Gemini, still have many limitations. They lie; they misunderstand; they lack the necessary integrations to do even some of the basic things Alexa and Assistant have been able to do for years. Gemini models still do absurd, deal-breaking things from time to time, like telling people to eat rocks and creating diverse founding fathers. However, if you believe that the era of artificial intelligence is coming, or maybe even already here, there is nothing more critical right now than introducing an AI platform to users. People develop novel habits, learn novel systems, and develop novel relationships with their virtual assistants. The more rooted we become, the less likely we are to abandon our AI friend for another.

ChatGPT had the first mover advantage and captured the world’s imagination by showing how compelling an AI chatbot could be. But Google has distribution. It can present its glowing icon every day to virtually the entire Internet population, across a huge range of products, and get the kind of data and feedback it needs to ultimately get it right. Even fighting in court over how powerful its default search status was, Google is pursuing the same scenario with artificial intelligence. And it works again.