The Google Assistant, the very best part of the Google Pixel and any other Android phone worth its salt, is now on iOS. If you’re not a fan of Siri for whatever reason, this is Good News.
Hot off the back of the launch of Google Home in Australia, the Assistant’s launch on iOS — only on iOS 9.1 and newer OSes, which should be pretty much every iPhone these days — puts Google’s voice-powered AI on the second most popular platform after Android — and crucially in a place where it has to be to compete with Apple’s own Siri.
You can’t use the Google Assistant app to unlock your iPhone with “OK Google”, though — that’s still restricted to only the best of the best Android phones, and we don’t expect Apple to allow it to displace ‘Hey Siri’ any time soon. You still get Google’s excellent speech-to-text translation so you can actually ask the Assistant questions instead of typing them out. [App Store]