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Google Assistant vs Siri
March 15, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
9★
Virtual assistant integrated in conversational user interface products: Google Allo and Google Home. You can ask a question for an answer, and follow up with multiple questions, with Google picking the conversation out and returning the right answer.
9★
Talk to Siri as you would to a friend and it can help you get things done — like sending messages, placing calls, or making dinner reservations. You can ask Siri to show you the Orion constellation or to flip a coin. Siri works hands-free, so you can ask it to show you the best route home and what your ETA is while driving. And it’s connected to the world, working with Wikipedia, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Shazam, and other online services to get you even more answers. The more you use Siri, the more you’ll realize how great it is. And just how much it can do for you.
The universe is vast, full of mysteries and occasionally produces things like virtual assistants, which—while not quite up to the task of making a decent cup of tea—are remarkably good at setting alarms and answering pointless trivia. Google Assistant and Siri are both such creations, designed to respond to human voices with a mix of efficiency and mild confusion. They both excel at controlling lights, playing music and misunderstanding requests in multiple languages, making them equally indispensable and infuriating at the same time. Whether you need a weather update or a reminder to water your cat (which, frankly, should raise some concerns), they’re more than happy to comply—assuming they heard you correctly.
Google Assistant, born in 2016 from the vast and all-knowing Googleplex, has an uncanny ability to hold a conversation that almost makes you forget you’re talking to a machine—until it suddenly decides to play Peruvian pan flute music instead of setting a timer. It is particularly good at finding obscure facts, because, well, it was raised by the world’s largest search engine. It integrates smoothly with a sprawling empire of smart devices, which means it can do things like preheat your oven while simultaneously reminding you that you once searched for "how to bake a potato" three years ago. If you’re deep in the Google ecosystem, it’s a bit like having a very obedient, slightly nosy digital butler.
Siri, on the other hand, has been around since 2011, making it the older and occasionally more eccentric cousin of the AI world. Being an Apple creation, it is charmingly exclusive—if you’re not using an Apple device, it doesn’t want to know you. Siri is particularly devoted to privacy, sometimes to the extent that it refuses to understand its own user. While it won’t spill your secrets to advertisers, it also won’t always remember what you just asked it. It’s deeply enmeshed in Apple’s walled garden, so it works wonderfully with iMessage, FaceTime and AirPods but has been known to react with mild horror when asked to interact with anything Google-related.
See also: Top 10 AI Assistants
Google Assistant, born in 2016 from the vast and all-knowing Googleplex, has an uncanny ability to hold a conversation that almost makes you forget you’re talking to a machine—until it suddenly decides to play Peruvian pan flute music instead of setting a timer. It is particularly good at finding obscure facts, because, well, it was raised by the world’s largest search engine. It integrates smoothly with a sprawling empire of smart devices, which means it can do things like preheat your oven while simultaneously reminding you that you once searched for "how to bake a potato" three years ago. If you’re deep in the Google ecosystem, it’s a bit like having a very obedient, slightly nosy digital butler.
Siri, on the other hand, has been around since 2011, making it the older and occasionally more eccentric cousin of the AI world. Being an Apple creation, it is charmingly exclusive—if you’re not using an Apple device, it doesn’t want to know you. Siri is particularly devoted to privacy, sometimes to the extent that it refuses to understand its own user. While it won’t spill your secrets to advertisers, it also won’t always remember what you just asked it. It’s deeply enmeshed in Apple’s walled garden, so it works wonderfully with iMessage, FaceTime and AirPods but has been known to react with mild horror when asked to interact with anything Google-related.
See also: Top 10 AI Assistants
