I Compared Siri AI to Gemini on iPhone and There's a Clear Winner

After a two-year tease, Siri AI is officially available to beta testers, once they get off the waitlist. For the last couple of days, I’ve had access to Siri AI on my iPhone 16 Pro, and naturally, the first question I had was, “Why should I use this instead of just the Gemini app?"

That’s because, underneath Apple’s new UI and Private Cloud Compute, the company trained its new Siri AI on Gemini models, and sends some processes to Google servers, though the company is adamant the same privacy policies apply. I already went hands-on with the new Clean Up tool powered by Gemini and came out surprisingly impressed (though Reframe clearly needs some work). In this article, I want to compare Siri AI with Gemini, the AI system it owes much of its existence to. While Apple has managed to cram useful AI features into quite possibly every native app, this comparison is focused on Siri AI and the Gemini app on iPhone. While Apple has pushed Siri to new heights here, Google's AI, in my view, still has the edge overall.

Siri AI’s integration advantage

The first thing to address here is how you use Siri AI on your iPhone. It’s directly integrated into Spotlight, and there’s a brand new gesture that breaks almost 20 years of iPhone muscle memory. When you swipe down from the center of the top of the screen (above the Dynamic Island), you'll activate the new “Search or Ask” field. Here, you can start typing your query, and press Enter to search. (Don't worry: You can still call Siri with the Side button.)

There’s a slick new Siri animation, after which the bubble expands to show you the answer. This can be a simple, short text response, or data from supported apps. This feature is currently limited to Apple’s apps, but after the public release, it will support third-party apps as well. Gemini, of course, doesn’t have all these features, at least not on iOS. The fastest way to access Gemini is through the Home Screen widget, or by assigning a shortcut to the Action button.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Siri AI’s app integration is a real advantage here, even in the early stages. You can ask Siri to bring up all reminders due today, calendar events of the week, or even surface new emails from a sender. In my testing, the first two went quite well. I particularly like how iOS will pull in visual elements from the Reminder and Calendar apps here, along with the relevant data. The Mail app did the job as well, but when compared to Gemini's Gmail integration, it performed slightly worse. For example, when I asked both apps to pull my recent credit card statements, Siri AI only showed details from one statement, whereas Gemini compiled the due date and amounts for all three of my credit cards.

Siri AI gets straight to the point

In the Gemini app, you can choose between three models: Flash, Flash-Lite, and Pro. The Pro model uses reasoning and therefore takes longer to respond. Siri AI offers no such options. You ask Siri AI something, and all you get is a “working on it” status message. And then relatively quickly you get an answer.

While Siri AI is trained on Gemini’s models, the company has clearly customized the experience to its own design. The effect is that Siri AI is sometimes faster than Gemini, and, in my experience, always more direct when it comes to answering both general-knowledge questions as well as web research queries. I've always found Gemini's responses a bit too verbose, wasting tokens on buttering you up before getting to the answer. There’s none of that fluff in Siri AI.

The new Siri returns with one-paragraph answers most of the time, and, importantly, includes the actual answer. You are free to swipe down from the floating window to expand the answer, and to open the Siri AI app itself. I find that Siri usually has more context and options here. Just like Gemini, Siri also cites its sources. In fact, Siri lists all its sources at the bottom of the message, while Gemini links to sources in the text and sometimes doesn't provide sources at all.

Gemini is still better at research

Siri AI isn’t designed for in-depth research, at least not in its current form. Gemini’s Pro models, on the other hand, excel at things like finding and collating information and guides based on Google searches. For example, I asked both Siri and Gemini to help me find a laptop for my wife’s dental practice.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Both did a good job of outlining the must-haves: a powerful processor like the AMD Ryzen 7, at least RTX 4050 graphics to run the GPU-intensive dental scanning programs, and 16GB RAM. But when I asked Siri to find me suitable options, it just did the bare minimum. It suggested some popular global options, but they weren’t tailored to India. Gemini, on the other hand, showed options that were available in India, with their pricing and links.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Similarly, I asked Siri and Gemini both to give me some hamstring stretches to perform after a workout. Siri just came back with some web images. After further prodding, it gave me a couple of stretches to try. Gemini Flash gave me a detailed breakdown, along with example images, right from the get-go.

Gemini is still the best overall package compared to Siri AI

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

As it stands, Gemini is the more complete package in my view. You can organize conversations in notebooks, perform deep research, generate videos, among many other tasks. Siri AI, by design, is more limited and more focused. The answers are to the point and are often paired with a well-designed interface. (Above, Siri AI gives me the timing for an F1 race, along with the starting grid in a cool UI.)

That’s where Apple's bot really shines: use Siri AI to securely pull data from Apple apps; use it to ask for information about current events; use it to ask pointed questions about the world (or things you would usually use Google search for). For all the above, Siri AI returns accurate responses most of the time, but that’s where Siri AI’s prowess ends. If you want to do detailed shopping comparisons, research a topic, or create visualizations, you’ll still need to use the Gemini app. Of course, Siri AI is still in beta testing, so things could change. But Apple doesn't yet have plans to add some of these Gemini features to its own bot, so, on the front, Gemini still has the advantage.