Google's highly advanced Assistant may soon make a major push onto the iPhone
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
At this weekend's Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Google product management director Gummi Hafsteinsson suggested that the search giant's flagship virtual assistant may be making its way to the world's most popular smartphone.
"I don't think we have anything to announce at this point," Hafsteinsson told Geekster. "But I think the general philosophy is that we would like to have the Assistant available to as many people as possible."
The comments came after Hafsteinsson announced that Google Assistant would soon be available on Android Wear 2.0, Android TV and Android Auto.
Of course, any appearance of Google Assistant on the iPhone would only be within Google's iOS apps, as Apple is unlikely to ship iPhones with anything but its proprietary Siri software built in. Technically, Google Assistant is already on the iPhone, but it's only housed within Google's new chat app, Allo. It has yet to reach Google's other iPhone apps.
Google Assistant is currently more advanced than Siri, and reports indicate that Apple may try to nip any user-poaching in the bud by announcing upgrades to Siri at June's Worldwide Developers Conference.
Either way, it appears that the virtual assistant wars are only getting started, as it was reported yesterday that Samsung paid over $200 million for Viv, the company that created Siri in 2009.
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