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

One of the main changes in Samsung’s new phones is simple: when you long press the side button on your phone, you get Google Gemini instead of activating Samsung’s own Bixby assistant by default.

That’s probably a good thing. Bixby was never a very good virtual assistant—Samsung originally built it primarily as a way to more easily navigate device settings, not to get information from the Internet. It’s gotten better since and can now do standard Assistant stuff like perform visual searches and set timers, but it 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 great news! Your assistant is probably feeling 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 launched, but has caught up in a big way. According to 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. There can only be 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 are likely to start using it more—or use it at all—now that it’s so accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of every one of its products, it brings with it 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, Google seems to be way ahead of its competition in one important way: Gemini is the most capable virtual assistant on the market right now, and it’s not very close. It’s not that Gemini is particularly great; it’s just that it has more access to more information and more users than anyone else. This race is still in its early stages and no The AI ​​product is still very good – but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get good really fast. It worked so well with search that it got Google in antitrust trouble. This time, at least for now, it looks like Google will have an even easier time taking over the market.

For years, there were three meaningful players in the virtual assistant space. Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri all offered similar features and were similarly accessible via speakers and phones and wearables. But now? The much-hyped, AI-first “Remarkable Alexa” is by all accounts massively delayed and massively underpowered. Recent versions of Siri shipped with a crazier animation and seemingly no new smart features or capabilities.

There are, of course, other ascendant AI assistants. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Copilot all have strong underlying models and some share the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are plenty of good reasons to choose them or even something like Confusion over Gemini. But they lack the most important thing: distribution. These are apps 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 why OpenAI is said to be working on everything from a web browser to a Jony Ive-designed ChatGPT gadget: the built-in capabilities usually win.

The built-in options are also the ones that tend to have the best cross-platform integration, which can be the whole ball game. Gemini can already change settings on your phone and, with new upgrades, can even do things across apps — pulling 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 built, no other assistant has this kind of access—and again, there’s no indication that Siri will ever be as good as it needs to be. If the future of assistants is this kind of agentic, using-your-apps-for-you behavior, Google’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 get Gemini access. You can access Gemini with a single click from your Gmail inbox or invoke it with a single keystroke in Docs. And the underlying technology is even more widespread. You can use Gemini to find things on YouTube and in Drive, and practically every time you search, a Gemini-powered AI summary will appear 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 “twin” appears 29 times in the earnings call transcript, just three fewer than “search.”)

When it comes to how people actually meet and interact with these models, however, the phone is still the AI ​​device of choice. And that’s where Google might have its biggest advantage. “Gemini’s deep integration enhances Android,” Pichai said on the earnings call. “For example, Gemini Live allows you to have free-flowing conversations with Gemini; people love it.” So far, smartphones are the most compelling AI devices, and Google can integrate its systems unlike anyone else. Apple, trying to play catch-up with the iPhone, had to launch an awkward handover with ChatGPT, just so Siri could answer more questions.

All of these assistants, including Gemini, still have many limitations. They lie; they misunderstand; they lack the necessary integrations to do even some of the basic things Alexa and Assistant have been able to do for years. The Gemini models still occasionally do ridiculous, deal-breaking things like tell people to eat rocks and generate various founders. But if you believe the AI ​​era is coming, or maybe even here, then there’s nothing more important right now than getting your AI platform in front of users. People develop new habits, learn new systems, develop new relationships with their virtual assistants. The more rooted we become, the less likely we are to dump our AI friend for someone else.

ChatGPT had the first-mover advantage and captured the world’s imagination by showing how compelling an AI chatbot could be. But Google has the distribution. It can put its shiny icon in front of practically the entire population of the Internet every single day, across a huge range of products, and get the kind of data and feedback it needs to eventually do this well. Although Google is fighting in court over how powerful its default status made it in search, Google is executing the same playbook with AI. And it works again.