So Google finally shipped a standalone Assistant app for the iPhone this week, and because I apparently have nothing better to do with a Wednesday night, I downloaded it about four minutes after I saw the App Store notification. Free download, no fine print, just Google Assistant sitting on my home screen next to Siri like two roommates who don't talk to each other.
First impression: it's better than Siri at the stuff Siri has always been bad at, and worse than Siri at the one thing that actually matters on a phone, which is being fast. You tap the icon, wait for it to open, wait for the little colored dots to settle, and then you can talk to it. On my 6s that's maybe two full seconds of dead air before it's even listening. Compare that to double-tapping the home button for Siri, which starts listening basically instantly even if what it hears is usually disappointing.
I asked it the dumb standard questions everyone asks a new assistant. "What's the capital of Australia." Got it right, said Canberra, even added the population, which Siri also does now so that's a wash. Then I asked it to set a timer for pasta and it just... couldn't. Told me it can't set timers on iPhone yet. Which, fine, I get that it's a first release and Apple isn't exactly rolling out the red carpet for a competitor's assistant to touch Reminders and Alarms, but if you can't set a timer, what are we even doing here. That's like the third most basic thing you'd want a voice assistant to do after weather and jokes.
The genuinely good part is the follow-up questions. I asked "who directed Alien" and it told me Ridley Scott, and then I just said "how old is he" with no other context and it knew I meant Ridley Scott, not Alien, not me. Siri would've either guessed wrong or just launched a web search and shrugged. That's the conversational memory thing Google's been showing off in demos for a year now and it's the first time I've actually felt it work on my own phone instead of on a stage in Mountain View.
I'll say the thing nobody wants to say out loud: I don't think I'm going to use this app much. Not because it's bad, it's clearly the smarter assistant in a lot of ways, but because it lives in its own silo. It can't set my alarms, can't control HomeKit stuff, can't do anything with the apps I already have open. It's a very smart guest in a house it doesn't have keys to. Siri is dumber but it's actually plugged into the phone. I don't know how Google fixes that without Apple handing over access it has zero incentive to hand over, so I suspect this stays a novelty app for most people, the thing you show a friend once and then forget about, the same way half of us forgot Google Now even existed.
Unrelated tangent because I can't help myself: has anyone else's office turned into a fidget spinner convention in the last two weeks? I counted seven of them on desks this morning walking to get coffee. Someone in accounting has one with LED lights that syncs to a phone app, which feels like the most 2017 sentence I will type all month. I don't get it, but I also spent four minutes talking to my phone about pasta timers tonight so who am I to judge anyone's relationship with small plastic objects.
Anyway. If you've got an iPhone and you're curious, it's worth the download just to see the follow-up question thing work once, it's a neat little glimpse of where this is all going even if the app itself feels like a beta wearing a launch announcement as a costume. I'll probably keep it installed. I'll probably also forget it's there by July.
One more thing before I close the laptop: if you're on Windows and you still haven't patched since the ransomware mess a few weeks back, do it tonight, not tomorrow. I helped my sister update three machines at her place last weekend and two of them hadn't restarted in something like five months. Don't be that person.