It’s been about a year since Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024. Since then, Siri has received a visual refresh with its new rainbow animation, text-to-Siri support, visual intelligence, and image generation. Features like Genmoji are also available in iOS 18. However, the most critical aspects of Siri, like being conversational and having contextual awareness, are still missing. Meanwhile, AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity are leaps and bounds ahead of Siri in many ways. So, I wanted to put all three to the test to see who deserves to be your go-to voice assistant on the iPhone today. Here is what I found.
I highly recommend watching the video below to see all three in action. It will give you a better sense of accuracy and response speed for each assistant.
The setup
For this test, I used the free versions of all three assistants. I wanted to make it so anyone could try these out at any time and see how good they are out of the box.
I also had a few hunches going in:
Siri might surprise us when it comes to app integrations.
Perplexity could be a quiet contender with real-time info and partial app support.
ChatGPT would probably be the smartest, but wouldn’t be able actually to do much on my iPhone.
Leave your hunches in the comments below. Now let’s get started.
Basic knowledge
This is the easiest one for all three. I asked simple questions like:
Who is the president of France?
Can you convert Fahrenheit to Celsius?
Can you define this?
All three handled it very easily. Siri responded with a visual text prompt on screen while the other two responded vocally. I did notice that Perplexity’s assistant spoke much slower than GPT, but regardless, they all nailed it. One thing to note is that I did not ask follow-up questions here.
Winner: Tied
Navigation and local search
Here is where things get a bit more interesting. I asked each of these to find me a pet-friendly pizzeria near me, and then I asked it to navigate me there. So this was a double question prompt that also had to take action for me.
ChatGPT gave me a list of places that fit my criteria, but because there is zero app integration, it could not send me to the maps app to navigate.
Perplexity found the same spots and then showed me a routed map in the Perplexity app. Then, it gives you a single-tap option to go to the Apple Maps app, so it got me just one step away from navigating there.
Siri handled it best because it is built by Apple and has proper integration in apps. It found a few spots and then opened up Apple Maps to give me turn-by-turn directions.
Winner: Siri
Current event article summarization
Now we are getting into it. I asked each assistant to pull up the latest 9to5mac article and then summarize it for me. Here is how each faired:
Siri failed miserably. It pulled up a list of 9to5mac articles via the news App, and that’s it. It could not summarize anything for me
ChatGPT found the correct article I was looking for and gave a brief vocal summary, which was nice.
Perplexity found the article and also summarized it, but what I liked is that it asked for confirmation that that was the article I was looking for. I appreciated that.
Winner: Perplexity
Real-world problem solving
I recently used ChatGPT’s live video feed to help me figure out how to turn on a pool heater pump. I was in awe. I opened up the voice assistant, pointed the camera at the pump, and it knew exactly what to do and how to do it. So I wanted to see how these assistants would fare by asking them to help me with a flat tire. Weirdly enough, only GPT gave me a detailed, step-by-step answer. Perplexity stalled after one or two prompts. Siri didn’t hold up at all.
Winner: ChatGPT
Travel and time logic
Here I got a bit weird with it. I wanted to ask them a question that in theory should be easy, but something most people wouldn’t ask. I said, “If I left NYC at 5PM and drove 6 hours, what cities could I reach?”.
All three assistants gave me some decent answers. They all listed cities that were 4-6 hours away from NYC.
Perplexity was the only one that was actually able to pull up a map and show me the options. Then also get me one step away from opening Apple Maps and navigating there.
Winner: Perplexity
App integration and utilities
This is where GPT gets overtaken big time and also where Siri flexes its muscles. Perplexity is this weird middle ground because it does have some integrations into iOS, but can’t do much with it.
Siri is the only assistant that can open both first- and third-party apps. It can send iMessages, open third-party apps like Spotify, and trigger reminders natively. This is where Siri surprised me a bit. If you have straightforward actions and you know what you need to get done, Siri can accomplish it. But you cannot get too complicated, otherwise it just times out.
Perplexity can draft an email, play music via Apple Music, and open podcasts, but requires confirmation taps. Also, perplexity can only work with 1st party iOS apps. When you ask it to do something with a non-Apple app, it just won’t.
ChatGPT has zero integrations with any apps, so it got disqualified.
Winner: Siri
Final verdict: Who should you use?
This depends on how you define an AI assistant. If that means to take action for you via voice, then there is no real contest other than Siri. Siri is the only assistant that can do anything at all in iOS. But if an AI assistant to you is a real-world helper that can help with fact-based questions and have true conversational dialogue, then Chat GPT is the way to go. I have GPT mapped to my action button. If Siri and GPT could somehow integrate, then that is the best of both worlds; maybe that will come with iOS 19. But for now, I will continue to use GPT as a Siri replacement.
As I said, I recommend watching our video to see this all unfold in real time. But let me know what you think. Do you use AI assistants? Do you use Siri? I plan on trying out other AI assistants to compare to Siri, so let me know which comparison you want to see next!
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