The new Siri finally has something Google Gemini can't compete with

What if all of your data, including your messages, email, photos, and notes, could be used to create your own personal AI model that you could use to pull up pieces of information buried within text messages or older photos, just by speaking to your assistant?

What if these pieces of data could talk to one another even if they were in different apps, such that you could ask your device to message your partner all the photos you took at a particular party without you having to open multiple apps?

And what if all of this could happen securely on-device? This is the promise of Siri AI and in several key areas it significantly surpasses what Google's Gemini can do.

Apple's Siri AI doesn't work on all devices

Here's what you'll need to get the most features

Not all Apple devices can fully utilize Siri AI because it requires the right neural engine, enough RAM, and a powerful enough CPU to run large language models locally.

Here's the hardware you'll need to fully run Siri AI:

Any iPhone 18, 17, or 16 iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max iPhone Air iPhone Duo All iPads and Macs with M-series chips plus the 7th generation iPad Mini MacBook Neo

You have to turn on Siri AI, which might require a waiting period that can take several days or weeks, depending on where you live. To do that, go to Settings > Siri > Try Siri AI (Beta), then follow the prompts to join the waitlist. As usual, you can bring up Siri by saying "Hey Siri" or by pressing and holding the side power button.

One of the best features of Siri AI is that all of your requests go to the new Siri app and are synchronized across all of your Apple devices. This is especially helpful if you craft the perfect request and want to later revisit the results.

On-device Personal Indexing brings together Messages, Mail, Calendar, Photos and more

Siri is constantly building a private, local knowledge database on your device comprised of your messages, email, calendar, notes, photos and files. You just have to make sure you've opted to have these things be searchable by going to Settings > Search > Messages > turn on Show App in Search and Show Content in Search. When I first started using Siri AI, it wasn't indexing my messages for some reason, until I turned it on.

This enables a lot of interesting possibilities that you don't get on Gemini because Siri AI continuously builds a model of all of your data.

Just a note that this initial indexing of your personal data can take a long time, and the more time your device stays on the charger, the faster it goes. With Gemini, Google already has your data on its servers, so there's no waiting for it to index.

Here are a handful of queries that can almost magically surface information and take action on your phone in a way that feels incredibly personal:

Look up the restaurant [name] suggested: how long is the drive to it? How often should I water the plant that [name] gave me? Find the text message from Mom about where we're having lunch tomorrow and tell me what time I need to leave work to get there on time. Send the pictures I took in New York City to Dad.

That said, Gemini also has Personal Context if you opt in, but it's not as seamlessly integrated into the voice assistant, and it can't access your text messages to build a persistent personal index like Siri AI can, which is arguably one of the richest sources of personal data.

Siri AI's Screen-Aware Action Execution is highly accurate and useful

See something on your screen that you want to take action on? Just ask Siri AI. While Gemini can also analyze what's on your screen, it's doing it in a much more elementary way, using what amounts to optical character recognition (OCR)—if we're being simplistic—to "read" and parse what's on your screen, much like a human does. It then uses Gemini Nano (the on-device AI model that Google puts on your device) or cloud Gemini models to read and understand what it's seeing.

Siri AI's on-screen awareness is far more advanced. Instead of just looking at the content of the screen itself, it looks at the underlying UI hierarchy like text fields, labels, and other identifiers that lets Siri AI understand different types of data that it can then associate to various app intents and actions.

This translates into an ability for Siri AI to take action across multiple apps. Like, as previously described, it can find and "read" the text message from your spouse about where you're meeting for dinner, then add it to your calendar. It could even go a step beyond that, if you ask, and text your babysitter the details of your dinner date. It can be a real time saver.

Private Cloud Compute keeps data private when it leaves your device

One of the reasons Apple took so long to do AI is because they wanted to do it securely such that most of your personal information, your requests, and most of your data never leaves your device, which is not the case with Gemini, where most of the processing happens in the cloud. For requests that have to leave your device, Apple utilizes something called Private Cloud Compute (PCC). While it's true that Gemini underpins parts of Siri's functionality, it's done in a way that exceeds Google's own security standards in order to achieve the high privacy bar that Apple has dictated.

Apple has published extensively about Private Cloud Compute, but allow me to summarize what it does. The core tenet behind PCC is that any data you send to Apple for processing must only be used to fulfill the request, with no ability to store or access that data, even from Apple itself. The data and the request leave no trace in Apple's systems, and, in fact, data volumes are randomized by the device's Secure Enclave.

This is all pretty technical but a short way of saying the above is that Apple goes to great lengths to make sure your data stays on your device, but that if it needs to go to the cloud for processing via PCC, it's done in a way that even Apple can't see your data or your request, making it basically invisible to anyone.

Gemini is still very capable

But Siri AI's on-device capability is unmatched

Gemini is still a very capable AI framework, and even allows for a lot of really cool automations. But when it comes to securely leveraging the treasure trove of data on your phone, Siri AI is currently unmatched, and when it gets your request right, leveraging data and performing actions across multiple apps, it feels like magic.