I’m sitting here enjoying the afterglow of all the new products Google has just shown off at its Made for Google event, where it launched a range of new Google Pixel 9 phones, as well as the Google Pixel Watch 3 and Google Pixel Buds 2 Pro. While the new phones would normally be the stars of the show, this time around they played second fiddle to the software running on them, most notably Gemini Live, the all-encompassing AI digital assistant that’s baked into the heart of Android 15.
Google demonstrated the best AI feature I’ve seen yet: the ability to talk to your phone and have it respond back to you, as if it were a human. This is a next-level digital assistant, and Gemini Live stole the show, despite an embarrassing moment when the live demo failed spectacularly twice. Live demos at Google product launches have a long history of going badly, so I’m surprised Google keeps doing them.
Here’s a demo of Gemini Live, which works this time:
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With Gemini Live you can do more than just talk. Take a picture of a poster for an event and ask Gemini if you are free to go to the show on that date, or take a picture of your fridge and ask what you could cook with those ingredients, and it will come up with some helpful suggestions.
Of course, nothing in the AI world ever seems to be completely finished. Gemini’s most useful integration features are the ability to peek into your Calendar and Gmail apps and answer genuinely useful digital assistant-style questions, like, “Can you remind me what Tim said about the bowling game next week?” But these features come with a “coming soon” label. I’m sure they’ll arrive soon, but AI has a reputation for being a slow-moving technology. Bloomberg, for example, has already cast doubt on Apple’s ability to have Apple Intelligence fully functional in time for the iPhone 16 launch in September.
AI is still struggling to find a valid reason to exist on our devices, but thanks to Google Gemini, the core benefit of AI is becoming increasingly clear. It’s all about fundamentally changing the way you interact with your phone. By comparison, the AI image manipulation features that both Apple and Google have shown off so far are impressive, but they feel a bit like gimmicks that you try once or twice and then forget about; good for product demos, but little else.
As for who has the better AI, Apple or Google, we won’t know until the iPhone 16 comes out and we can interrogate Siri after the betas. We know Google has now set the bar high for natural conversational AI thanks to Gemini Live, but the killer feature that could allow Apple to beat it is price. Apple Intelligence will be free for anyone lucky enough to own an iPhone 15 Pro or better, or a Mac with an M-series processor. Gemini Live is only for Gemini Advanced subscribers, and that costs $20 a month. So for once, Apple appears to be beating Google at its own game by releasing a free service.
