One of the most important changes in Samsung’s new phones One is simple: when you long-press the side button on your phone, instead of activating Samsung’s own Bixby assistant by default, You will get Google Gemini.
This is probably a good thing. Bixby c There is never too much of a virtual assistant — Samsung originally created this primarily as a way to navigate device settings, not to retrieve information from the Internet. It’s gotten better since then and can now do standard Assistant things like make visual searches and set timers, but it’s never managed to catch up to 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 caught off guard a few years ago When ChatGPT was launched But caught on in a big way. Accordingly Latest reporting from The Wall Street JournalCEO Sundar Pichai now believes that Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and he wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It can get one Samsung phone at a time.
Gemini is now a front-and-center feature on the world’s most popular Android phones, and tens of millions of people will likely start using it — or use it at all — now that it’s so accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of each of its products, that brings a very 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, Google seems way ahead of its competitors in one important way: Gemini is the most capable virtual assistant on the market right now, and it’s not particularly close. It’s not that Gemini is particularly great; It’s just that it has more information and more access to more users than anyone else. This race is still in the early stages, and No The AI product is still great — but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get better really fast. It worked so well with the search that it Put Google in an antitrust problem. This time around, at least for now, it looks like Google will have an even easier time taking over the market.
It’s not that Gemini is particularly great; It’s just that it has more information and more access to more users than anyone else
For years, there were three significant players in the virtual assistant space. Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri offered similar features and were similarly accessible through speakers and phones and wearables. But now? very popular, AI-first “unique Alexa” is, by all accounts, massively delayed and Massively low power. Shipped with the latest versions of Siri A wackier animation And seemingly no new smarts or capabilities.
Of course, there are other emerging AI assistants. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have strong underlying models, and some share the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are many good reasons to choose them or even something like a crush on Gemini. But they’re missing the most important thing: distribution. There are apps that you have to download, log in and open every time. Gemini is a button you can push — and that’s a big difference. There’s a reason OpenAI is reportedly working on everything from web browsers to the Jony Ive-designed ChatGPT gadget: built-in options usually win.
The built-in options are also the best integrations into the platform, which can be a whole ballgame. Gemini can already change settings on your phone and, with new upgrades, Can also do things in apps – Getting information from your email and dumping it into a text message draft, just to name one example. Because of the way iOS and Android are architected, no other assistant has this kind of access — and again, there’s no sign that Siri is ever going to be as good as it needs to be. . If the future of assistants is like this Agent, behavior-for-your-apps-usersGoogle’s internal advantage may be unparalleled.
Google is practically spoiled for places to put Gemini
Meanwhile, Google is practically spoiled for places to put Gemini. The company recently announced that all paying Workspace customers will get Gemini access. You can access Gemini with a click from your Gmail inbox or invoke it with a keystroke in Docs. And the underlying technology is even broader. You can use Gemini to find content in YouTube and Drive, and practically every time you search, a Gemini-powered AI overview appears at the top of your results. “Today, all seven of our products and platforms with more than two billion monthly users use Gemini models,” Pichai said on Google’s earnings call last fall. (Fun fact: The word “Gemini” appears 29 times in that earnings call transcript, just three less than “Search”)
When it comes to how people actually encounter and interact with these models, however, the phone is still the AI device of choice. And this is where Google has perhaps the biggest advantage. “Gemini’s deep integration is making Android better,” Pichai said on that earnings call. “For example, Gemini Live lets you interact freely with Gemini; People love it.” For now, smartphones are the most powerful AI devices, and Google can integrate its systems like no other. Apple, busy playing catch-up with the iPhone, has a chatGPT The awkward handoff had to start so Siri could answer more questions.
All these assistants, including Gemini, still have many limitations. They lie; They misunderstand; They lack the integration necessary to do some basic things with Alexa and Assistant for years. Gemini models still occasionally do ridiculous, deal-breaking things like asking people to eat rocks and producing various founding fathers. But if you believe the AI era is coming, or maybe even here, nothing is more important right now than getting your AI platform in front of users. People are developing new habits, learning new systems, developing new relationships with their virtual assistants. The more stuck we are, the less likely we are to dump our AI friend for someone else.
ChatGPT had a first-mover advantage and captured the world’s imagination by showing how compelling an AI chatbot could be. But Google has a division. It can put its shiny logo in front of practically the entire population of the Internet, across a wide range of products, every single day, and finally get the data and feedback it needs to do it well. Even as it battles in court how powerful its default position has made it in search, Google is playing the same playbook with AI. And it’s working again.
