Google simply introduced that Gemini will quickly be capable of deal with some multi-step duties in your telephone, like ordering meals or hailing a automobile, beginning first with the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Professional, and the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S26 telephones. All of it sounds a bit like options Apple introduced for Siri means again on the 2024 Worldwide Builders Convention — earlier than Apple delayed these deliberate options in March 2025 and which nonetheless aren’t launched.
Onstage, Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android, confirmed off a demo of how Gemini’s new agentic options would work to assist wrangle a pizza dinner order from his busy household group chat. Samat asks Gemini to take a look at the chat thread and determine what to order, after which make the order with a supply app. Onscreen — in a prerecorded video, it wasn’t stay — you’ll be able to see Gemini determining what everybody needs from the group chat and exhibiting that in a window. Then the person, through voice request, tells Gemini to finish that order, naming a selected pizzeria. Gemini then clicks by GrubHub to prep the order, all nonetheless onscreen. When the order is prepared, Gemini sends an alert so the person can evaluation it and really press the submit button.
Setting apart that this example doesn’t appear that sophisticated to do by your self within the GrubHub app (and even by calling the pizzeria to speak by it with a human), this can be a probably huge second for agentic AI. Google only in the near past added the power for Gemini to auto-browse for customers in Chrome, and with the ability to do one thing comparable proper inside Android looks like a logical subsequent step; Google clearly needs Gemini to be considered a useful agent or productiveness companion moderately than only a chatbot or a sequence of AI fashions.
Assuming the agentic Gemini options additionally launch “quickly” like Google is promising and that Apple doesn’t pull a rabbit out of its hat, Google may even beat Apple to the punch on a few of its most spectacular Apple Intelligence demos — additionally solely proven in prerecorded movies — from that WWDC 2024 present. One function Apple confirmed off would have let Siri perceive what’s in your display screen and take motion on it, which means you could possibly ask Siri so as to add an deal with from a Messages thread to the contact card of that particular person you’re texting with. Apple demoed how Siri would be capable of take actions inside and throughout apps for you. The corporate mentioned Siri would even be capable of perceive your private context, which means you could possibly ask it when your mother’s flight was touchdown and the assistant would pull the knowledge from an e mail and present it to you.
Practically two years later, none of that’s accessible but. When Apple introduced the options can be delayed, the corporate even pulled an commercial exhibiting off the options. And primarily based on reporting from Bloomberg, a few of the options could not arrive till iOS 27.
There are nonetheless many questions on Gemini’s new capabilities, after all. They’ll want to really ship. We’ll should strive them to see if they’re as helpful and purposeful as marketed — Google is looking this preliminary launch a “beta,” so there may very well be some tough edges. And we don’t know what number of builders will truly let Gemini flick through their apps on behalf of customers, which Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel likes to name the DoorDash drawback. (Google says Gemini will be capable of work in “choose rideshare and meals apps.”)
However Google appears to have leapfrogged Apple in an enormous means, and now Apple has much more to do to catch up.