Google CEO: Gemini Could Be Added to iPhones This Year

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company’s artificial intelligence service, Gemini, could soon become part of Apple’s iPhone.

During court proceedings Wednesday (April 30), Pichai said he is hopeful that Gemini will be added as a built-in option on Apple’s smartphone this year, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday.

Apple’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, uses its own models for most AI tasks available on the company’s phones, tablets and computers. However, the company has partnered with ChatGPT from OpenAI for integration with its Siri voice assistant and Writing Tools, a feature for creating and editing text, the report said.

Pichai said he hopes that Gemini, a ChatGPT rival, will be added as an additional AI option on Apple products, per the report. He said he spoke with Apple CEO Tim Cook on the topic last year and hopes to have a deal hammered out by mid-2025.

Apple and Google have longstanding tech partnerships, the report said. Google provides YouTube as a standalone app on the iPhone and powered the maps function on Apple products until 2012. Google is also the default search engine for Safari, Apple’s web browser.

That arrangement is at the center of the government’s antitrust case against Google, where Pichai made his comments, according to the report.

Apple will host its annual developer conference the week of June 9 and introduce new versions of its operating systems. If Google and Apple reach an AI deal, it will likely be announced then, per the report.

Google is in the middle of its largest AI push yet. The company has integrated AI across its product lines, with 15 of its products each having more than half a billion users now using Gemini models.

AI Overviews in search have reached 1.5 billion monthly users. In March, Google launched AI Mode, an experimental feature that permits more complex queries and advanced reasoning capabilities.

“We continue to see that usage growth is increasing as people learn that search is more useful for more of their queries,” Pichai said during a Thursday (April 24) earnings call, adding that AI Mode queries tend to be twice as long as those in traditional search.

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