Google and Samsung Unveil New AI Features, Outpacing Siri’s Capabilities

Google’s new Gemini agent will debut on the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Samsung’s just‑announced Galaxy S26, letting users trigger multi‑step actions such as ordering a pizza or hailing a ride directly from a voice prompt. During the Unpacked showcase, Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android, walked the audience through a pre‑recorded demo where Gemini scanned a family group chat, extracted each person’s food preferences, and then, after a spoken command, populated a GrubHub order for a specific pizzeria. The assistant completed the checkout flow, paused for user confirmation, and sent a final alert once the order was ready to submit — all without the user leaving the conversation thread — according to The Verge report.

The feature marks a logical extension of Gemini’s recent “auto‑browse” capability in Chrome, which lets the model fetch and synthesize web content on behalf of the user. By integrating similar agentic behavior into Android, Google is positioning Gemini as a productivity partner rather than a static chatbot. The Verge notes that the demo, while pre‑recorded, demonstrates a “potentially big moment for agentic AI” because it bridges contextual understanding (reading a chat) with concrete actions across third‑party apps (GrubHub, Uber). If the rollout proceeds as Google promises, the functionality will be live “soon,” giving Android users a tool that Apple’s Siri still lacks.

Apple’s roadmap for comparable Siri enhancements has stalled. The company announced at WWDC 2024 that Siri would eventually read screen content, add contacts from messages, and pull contextual data such as a mother’s flight arrival from email — but a March 2025 delay pushed those capabilities into an indefinite hold. Bloomberg reports that the features may not appear until iOS 27, and Apple even pulled an advertisement for the delayed functionality. As a result, the Gemini rollout on both Google’s own hardware and Samsung’s flagship device puts the two companies ahead of Apple in delivering real‑world, cross‑app AI assistance.

Samsung’s involvement adds another layer of significance. By bundling Gemini into the Galaxy S26, the world’s largest smartphone maker is effectively giving users access to Google’s most advanced on‑device AI without the need for a separate app ecosystem. CNET highlights that the integration of Perplexity’s models—another AI service—into Samsung phones underscores the company’s strategy of leveraging external AI talent to boost its hardware value proposition. This partnership not only accelerates the diffusion of agentic AI but also signals a shift where OEMs become the primary distribution channel for advanced language models.

The competitive implications are clear: Google’s early‑stage agentic features could set a new baseline for what consumers expect from mobile assistants. If Gemini can reliably interpret informal chat language, negotiate with third‑party services, and hand off final confirmation to the user, it will force Apple to either accelerate Siri’s delayed roadmap or risk ceding the “AI‑first” narrative to its rivals. As The Verge points out, the Gemini demo is “a logical next step” after Chrome auto‑browsing, and its presence on Samsung’s flagship suggests that the Android ecosystem will continue to outpace iOS in delivering tangible AI productivity tools—at least for the foreseeable future.