Samsung’s integration helps make Google Gemini the AI ​​assistant to beat

One of the most important changes in New Samsung phones It’s a simple way: when you long press the side button on your phone, instead of activating Samsung’s Bixby assistant by default, You will get Google Gemini.

Maybe that’s a good thing. It was Bixby Never a good virtual assistant – Originally designed by Samsung as a way to more easily navigate device settings, not to obtain information from the Internet. It’s improved since then, and can now do standard assistant things like perform visual searches and set timers, but it’s never been able 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! Maybe your assistant is better now. (And if, for some unknown reason, you really like Bixby, don’t worry: there’s still an app.)

The switch to Gemini is a bigger deal for Google. Google was surprised two years ago When ChatGPT was released But it caught on in a big way. according to Recent reports from The Wall Street JournalCEO Sundar Pichai now believes Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It may only be up to one Samsung phone at a time.

Gemini is now a front-and-center feature on the world’s most popular Android phones, and millions upon millions of people will likely start using it more — or using it at all — now that it’s more accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of every one of its products, this brings a hugely important new set of users and interactions. All that data makes Gemini better, which makes it more useful, which makes it more popular. Which makes it better again.

Right now, it looks like Google has a leg up on its competitors in an important way: Gemini is the most capable virtual assistant on the market right now, and it’s not particularly close. It’s not that Geminis are particularly cool; He has access to more information and more users than anyone else. This race is still in its early stages no The AI ​​product is pretty good so far, but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get good very quickly. This worked well with research Google got into antitrust trouble. This time, at least for now, it looks like Google will have an easier time dominating the market.

For years, there have been three significant players in the virtual assistant space. Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri all offered similar features, and were similarly accessible through speakers, phones, and wearables. But now? greatly exaggerated, The first artificial intelligence “Alexa is amazing” It is, by all accounts, significantly overdue Very weak strength. The latest versions of Siri shipped with The most ridiculous cartoon There seems to be no new intelligence or abilities.

There are, of course, other emerging AI assistants. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have powerful core models, and some share the same multimedia capabilities as Gemini. There are a lot of good reasons to choose them or even something like confusion over Gemini. But they’re missing the most important thing: distribution. They’re apps you have to download, sign in to, and open every time. Gemini is a button you can push, and that’s a big difference. There’s a reason OpenAI works on everything from the web browser to the ChatGPT tool designed by Jony Ive: built-in options usually win.

The built-in options are also the ones that tend to have the best cross-platform integration, which may be the whole ball game. Gemini can already change the settings on your phone, and with the new upgrades, It can also do things via apps – Obtaining information from your email and including it in a draft text message, but not limited to. Given the way iOS and Android are designed, no other assistant has this kind of access — and again, there’s no indication Siri will be as good as it needs to be. If the future of assistants is this kind of Proxy behavior, using your applications against youGoogle’s inherent advantage may be insurmountable.

Meanwhile, Google is practically spoiled for places to put Gemini. The company recently announced that all paying Workspace customers will gain access to Gemini. You can access Gemini with a single click from your Gmail inbox or summon it with a single keystroke in Docs. And the underlying technology is more widespread. You can use Gemini to find things on YouTube and in Drive, and practically every time you search, a Gemini-powered AI overview appears at the top of the results. “Today, all seven of our products and platforms with more than 2 billion monthly users use Gemini models,” Pichai said on Google’s earnings call last fall. (Fun fact: The word “Gemini” appears 29 times in earnings call transcripts, just three times less than the word “research.”)

When it comes to how people actually handle and interact with these models, the phone is still the AI ​​device of choice. And this is where Google probably has its biggest advantage. “Gemini’s deep integration improves the Android operating system,” Pichai said on this earnings call. “For example, Gemini Live allows you to have seamless conversations with Gemini; people love that.” Right now, smartphones are some of the most compelling AI devices, and Google can integrate its systems like no other. Apple, which was scrambling to catch up with the iPhone, had to launch an awkward rendition using ChatGPT just so Siri could answer more questions.

All of these helpers, including Gemini, still have a lot of limitations. They are lying; They misunderstand. They lack the integrations needed to do even some of the basic things that Alexa and Assistant have been able to do for years. Gemini archetypes still sometimes do silly, deal-breaking things like asking people to eat rocks and creating various founding fathers. But if you think the era of AI is coming, or perhaps it is already here, there is nothing more important now than putting your AI platform in front of users. People are developing new habits, learning new systems, and developing new relationships with their virtual assistants. The more entrenched we become, the less likely we are to ditch our AI friend in favor of another.

ChatGPT had the advantage of pioneering and captured the world’s imagination by showing how attractive an AI-powered chatbot could be. But Google has distribution. It can put its shiny icon in front of almost every internet user every day, across a wide range of products, and get the kind of data and feedback it needs to do it well in the end. Even as it fights in court over how strong its default position is in search, Google is implementing the same playbook with artificial intelligence. It is working again.