I Compared Siri AI With Gemini on IPhone, and There Is a Clear Winner.
After a two-year wait, Siri AI is officially available to beta testers —as soon as they clear the waitlist . I’ve been accessing Siri AI on my iPhone 16 Pro for the past couple of days, and naturally, the first question I had was, “Why should I use this instead of the regular Gemini app?”
That’s because, behind Apple’s new user interface and private cloud computing system, the company trained its new Siri AI on Gemini models and offloads some processes to Google servers—though the company insists on enforcing the same privacy policies. I’ve already tested the new Gemini-powered Clean Up tool and was pleasantly surprised (though Reframe clearly needs some work). In this article, I want to compare Siri’s AI with Gemini, the AI system to which it owes much of its existence. While Apple has managed to integrate useful AI features into virtually every native app , this comparison focuses on Siri’s AI and the Gemini app on iPhone. While Apple has taken Siri to the next level, Google’s AI still has the overall advantage, in my opinion.
Benefits of Siri AI Integration
The first thing to discuss is how to use Siri AI on your iPhone. It’s directly integrated into Spotlight, and a brand-new gesture has been added that breaks a nearly 20-year-old habit for iPhone users. Swiping down from the top center of the screen (above the Live Island) activates a new “Search or Ask” field. Here, you can start typing your query and press Enter to search. (Don’t worry: you can still summon Siri using the side button.)
The app features a new, sleek Siri animation, after which the pop-up window expands to reveal a response. This can be a simple, short text response or data from supported apps. Currently, this feature is only available in Apple apps, but after the public release, it will support third-party apps as well. Gemini, of course, doesn’t have all of these features, at least not on iOS. The fastest way to access Gemini is through a widget on the home screen or by assigning a keyboard shortcut to the Action button .
Siri AI’s integration with apps is a real advantage, even at the initial stage. You can ask Siri to show all the reminders you need to complete today, your calendar events for the week, or even display new emails from a sender. In my testing, the first two worked quite well. I especially like how iOS pulls visual elements from the Reminders and Calendar apps, along with the relevant data. The Mail app also did a good job, but compared to Gemini’s integration with Gmail, it performed slightly worse. For example, when I asked both apps to show my most recent credit card statements, Siri AI only showed details from one statement, while Gemini compiled the payment date and amounts for all three of my credit cards.
Siri’s artificial intelligence gets straight to the point.
The Gemini app offers three models to choose from: Flash, Flash-Lite, and Pro. The Pro model uses a logical approach and therefore takes longer to respond. Siri AI doesn’t offer these options. You ask Siri AI a question, and all you get is a status message stating “working on it.” Then you get a relatively quick response.
Although Siri AI was trained on Gemini models, the company has clearly tailored the user interface to its needs. As a result, Siri AI is sometimes faster than Gemini, and in my experience, it’s always more direct in responding to both general questions and web queries. Gemini’s responses always seemed too verbose to me, wasting tokens on flattery before getting to the answer. Siri AI has nothing of the sort.
The new Siri most often provides single-paragraph responses and, importantly, includes the response itself. You can swipe down from the floating window to expand the response and open the Siri AI app itself. I’ve noticed that Siri generally provides more context and options. Like Gemini, Siri also provides sources. In fact, Siri lists all its sources at the bottom of the message, while Gemini cites sources in the text, and sometimes doesn’t provide sources at all.
Geminis are still better at research.
Siri’s AI isn’t designed for in-depth research, at least in its current form. Gemini Pro models, on the other hand, excel at tasks like searching and organizing information and guides based on Google search queries. For example, I asked Siri and Gemini to help me find a laptop for my wife’s dental practice.
Both services did a good job of outlining the necessary specifications: a powerful processor, such as an AMD Ryzen 7, at least an RTX 4050 GPU for running resource-intensive dental scanning programs, and 16GB of RAM. But when I asked Siri to find suitable options, she only offered the bare minimum. She suggested a few popular options from around the world, but they weren’t optimized for India. Gemini, on the other hand, showed options available in India, along with prices and links.
Similarly, I asked Siri and Gemini to suggest some hamstring stretches to do after a workout. Siri simply pulled up a few images from the internet. After further prompting, she suggested a couple of stretches. Gemini Flash immediately provided detailed descriptions with example images.
Gemini is still a better all-round solution than Siri AI.
In my opinion, Gemini is a more complete package. It can be used to organize conversations in notebooks, conduct in-depth research, create videos , and much more. Siri AI is inherently more limited and focused. Responses are concise and often accompanied by a well-designed interface. (In the photo above, Siri AI tells me the start time of a Formula 1 race, as well as the starting grid, in a user-friendly interface.)
This is where Apple’s bot really shines: use Siri AI to securely retrieve data from Apple apps; use it to request information about current events; use it to ask specific questions about the world (or about things you typically search on Google). In all of the above, Siri AI provides accurate answers most of the time—but that’s where Siri AI’s capabilities end. If you want to conduct detailed product comparisons, research a topic, or create visualizations, you’ll still need the Gemini app. Of course, Siri AI is still in beta, so this could change. But Apple has no plans yet to add some of these Gemini features to its own bot, so Gemini still has the edge in this regard.