Gemini Integration Could be a Huge Upgrade Over ChatGPT in Siri
Sunday, February 23, 2025
A few weeks ago Federico Viticci wrote a great piece on MacStories about how one of Gemini’s greatest strengths in the LLM competition is that it’s the only one with Google app extensions. On Friday, Apple released the first beta of iOS 18.4 and while many of the AI updates that we were expecting weren’t there, references to one new feature we weren’t quite anticipating yet surfaced in a review of the update’s code. As spotted by Aaron from MacRumors, Apple is actively working on bringing Gemini to iOS alongside the current ChatGPT integration. This is super interesting, not because there will be another frontier model available to use with Siri for world knowledge but because if this version of Gemini includes extensions it will be leaps and bounds more useful than the existing ChatGPT integration.
As Federico points out in his story, Gemini 2.0 combined with Google Maps, Search, Workspace and YouTube is a formidable offering. The current ChatGPT integration in iOS allows you to sign in with your personal account to get even more out of Siri. While it doesn’t allow you to use custom GPTs or change the OpenAI model, it does save your conversations, lets you generate images with DALL-E and gives you extended usage limits if you have a paid subscription. With that all being the case with ChatGPT, one would have to imagine that Gemini in iOS would have some sort of additional integrations with Google services. I hope that it’s the extensions that communicate with Maps, Search, Workspace and YouTube.
I think it’s safe to say that Gemini in Siri will almost certainly be able to talk to Search and YouTube since neither of those require any sort of personal data. The question that I have is whether or not being signed in with your Google account will give Siri with Gemini the ability to access your Gmail, Calendar, and Drive? Given that you can already connect your Google account to iOS for mail, contacts, calendars, and notes I can’t see why they wouldn’t be able to integrate the other services as well. I’m not sure if Apple would prefer Google not offer this and instead allow their future Siri upgrade to directly surface information from your account once signed in rather than needing to pass off requests to Gemini. But like I said, I think it’s safe to imagine that Google Search and YouTube should at least be accessible through Gemini in Siri. Maps is the outlier here, particularly given the touchy history between the two companies. You could argue the same with YouTube, but I think that’s too fundamental to Search and Apple doesn’t have a competitor. While I want to lean towards Google Maps not being integrated, the data it offers is crucial to so many potential requests. Maybe Apple just defaults to standard Siri mapping results unless you specifically ask Gemini. We’ll have to wait and see.
At the end of the day, this is good news whether or not all of the extensions are fully available through Siri. Another model to choose from is already a big step for Apple to take and Gemini is getting better and better. It will give ChatGPT a real run for its money when users decide which service to use. That is of course, unless Apple allows Siri to work with both models at any time rather than forcing you to pick one in Settings. In which case, things get even more interesting. There are so many possibilities for how this could go down.