After asking it to schedule something, it prompted me to allow or block notifications, so sounds like this is just chatGPT scheduling push notifications? We'll see!
Siri has access to a wealth of private existing and future on-device APIs to fuel context sensitive responses to queries on vendor locked devices used all day long. (Which Apple has apparently decided to just not use yet.)
OpenAI doesn't, they just have a ton of funding and (up to recently) a good mass media story, and the best natural language responses.
The moat around Siri is much deeper, and I don't really see any evidence OpenAI has any special sauce that can't be reproduced by others.
My prediction is that OpenAI's reliance on AI doomerism to generate a regulatory moat falters as they become unable to produce step changes in new models, while Apple's efforts despite being halting and incomplete become ubiquitous thanks to market share and access to on device context.
I wouldn't (and don't) put my money in OpenAI anymore. I don't see a future for them beyond being the first mover in an "LLM as a service" space in which they have no moat. On top of that they've managed to absorb the worst of criticism as a sort of LLM lightning rod. Worst of all, it may turn out that off-device isn't even really necessary for most consumer applications in which case they'll start to have to make most of their money on corporate contracts.
Maybe something will change, but right now OpenAI is looking like a bubble company with no guarantee to its dominant position. Because it is what it is: simply the largest pooling of money to try to corner this market. What else do they have?
The counter argument is that Google doesn't maintain any of those services beyond the bare minimum for customer facing interactions, and exchanges between their services are even more poorly supported if they even exist at all.
Remember Google Sheets (already the Tonka Toys of spreadsheets) adding named tables to Sheets?
You can't use them in any of the AppsScript APIs. You have to fall back to manual searching for strings and index arithmetic.
Google Drive still barely supports anything like moving an entire folder to another folder.
They have failed at least a half dozen times now to deliver a functional chat/VOIP app after they already had one in Google Talk.
They regularly sunset products that actually have devoted and zealous user bases for indiscernible reasons.
Android is just chugging along doing nothing interesting and still carrying the same baggage it did before. It's a painful platform to develop for and the Jetpack Compose/Kotlin shift hasn't ameliorated much of that at all.
Their search offering is now worse than Bing, worse than Kagi, and worse than some of the LLM based tools that use their index. It's increasingly common that you can't even find a single link that you know an entire verbatim sentence from via Google search for inexplicable reasons. Exact keyword or phrase searches no longer work. You can't require a keyword in results.
I don't trust Google to deliver a single functional software product at this point, let alone a compelling integration of many different ones developed in different siloes.
About the only thing going for them is how many people still have Gmail accounts from that initial invite only and generous limits campaign... 20 years ago?
Google is not a healthy company. I don't invest in them anymore, and barring some major change I probably won't again. It's a dying blue chip which is a terrible position to have your money in.
P.S. oh, and Gemini is awful by comparison in both price and quality to competitors. It isn't saving them. It's just a "me too".
P.P.S. I'm personally just waiting for their next "game changing" announcement bound to fail to get in at the top floor on shorting what stock I have. It's one of those cases where finance has rose coloured glasses based on brand name that anyone who's used Google products for years would be thoroughly disabused of.
There are so many opportunities for google to improve their services.
For example, I found myself asking Claude about places to see in a city I’m visiting while switching back and forth to gmaps. This would have been a much better experience integrated directly with gmaps knowledge graph
