Gemini Vs. Google Assistant: What's The Difference & Which AI Is Smarter?

It can be hard to keep track of Google's products, which are often here one day and virtually gone the next. When it comes to rapidly evolving fields like AI and personal assistants, things are getting even more confusing. Case in point: Google Gemini is being pushed out to consumers while Google Assistant still exists. That means the search giant currently has two bots with a whole lot of overlapping functionality, leading many to wonder what the difference is between the two.

Both Google Gemini and Google Assistant are forms of AI, but the former is the newer form of generative AI that's been dominating headlines. However, while Assistant was specifically designed as a phone and smart home assistant, Gemini was designed as a general purpose AI more akin to ChatGPT. So, whereas Assistant is very good at specialized, device-focused tasks, general web searches, and not much more, Gemini is a jack of all trades but arguably a master of none.

I've been testing both side-by-side for over a year, and while Gemini wasn't ready to replace your phone assistant just a year ago, it's come a long way. Today, it comes as the default assistant app on new Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S25 series. But Assistant isn't gone yet. It can still be enabled on Android, and is also found on a wide variety of smart devices. So, let's break down the differences between each AI to figure out which tasks are best suited to each, and which Google AI is the smartest in 2025.

Google Assistant was first introduced in 2016 as a direct competitor to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. It can be found on most Android smartphones and tablets, newer Chromebooks, supported smart speakers and displays, and more. It is built on an older form of machine learning AI that can handle a limited range of natural language but is still rather keyword dependent (i.e. you have to be rather specific with your commands rather than speaking as you would to another human).

Gemini, by contrast, is Google's new, flagship large language model, a generative AI that Google hopes can become the all-encompassing, friendly, personal assistant that capital-A Assistant could never be. However, the trade off for being in some ways smarter is that it's much more unstable. Whereas Assistant required somewhat precisely worded commands to work correctly, Gemini is far more able to interpret more natural human language, which means users theoretically don't have to spam their phone. However, it is also more prone to misinterpretations or getting things wrong.

By default, Gemini does not have many of Assistant's most helpful capabilities, such as being able to set reminders, change device settings, or control smart homes. Google has added these features as extensions. For example, there is an Assistant extension that outsources things like reminders, and a Google Home extension to which Gemini will hand smart home requests. Unlike Assistant, Gemini is available not only as a phone assistant but also in a browser on desktop or mobile.

Let's say you're in the middle of cooking dinner and you need to know what temperature salmon should be cooked at. If you ask Google Assistant for the answer, it will search online, then give you an answer from a source Google's algorithms determine to be trustworthy (supposed trustworthiness is based on Google's internal heuristics to which the public is not privy). In this example, Google Assistant told me salmon should be baked at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, a fact it sourced from a site called Fine Dining Lovers. It gave the same answer on a second ask.

When I asked Gemini the same question with the same phrasing — "What temperature to cook salmon at?" — the AI spit back a long, bullet-pointed answer that told me to cook salmon at 350 degrees and gave me suggested times to cook different sizes of fillet. However, it did not tell me where it got the information. For that, I'd have needed to tap the Google logo at the bottom of the answer, which would have had the AI double check its output against internet sources. When I asked a second time, Gemini changed its answer from 350 degrees to 400 degrees, more closely matching Assistant's answer.

This illustrates the issue Gemini still faces when responding to basic Internet queries: it builds its own knowledge graph, but seems unable to interface with Google's actual Knowledge Graph in the same way Assistant is innately capable of. Last month, when I gave it a picture of my pantry and asked which foods would help with heartburn, it told me to eat the toilet paper stored there. While Gemini will undoubtedly continue to improve, Assistant remains the most reliable tool for getting quick, actionable answers to everyday questions.

As noted above, generative AI like Gemini is still outclassed by Google Assistant's ability to do a simple web search for information like cooking, weather, and so forth. On the other hand, for queries that stray off the beaten path of everyday life and can't be answered by an encyclopedic definition, Gemini is often the far more robust tool. To illustrate this, let's say I wanted to understand an economic concept like shoe leather cost. Assistant tells me the Wikipedia definition ("The cost of time and effort ... that people expend by holding less cash to reduce the inflation tax that they pay on cash holdings when there's high inflation") and gives some examples, like walking to the bank to withdraw cash. That's a decent explanation, but let's say I need to understand it in less academic terms. I asked Gemini to explain it like I'm five, and the AI came up with the example of a monster stealing from a piggy bank, which isn't a one-to-one comparison but makes the concept more accessible than my econ professor managed to back in the day.

Of course, as with all generative AI responses, you'll need to double check what Gemini tells you. In this example, I'm asking about a concept I already understand, so it's easy for me to tell that Gemini is correct in its explanation. But if I didn't know what shoe leather cost means, I'd have no way of knowing whether Gemini explained it correctly. Thankfully, Gemini includes an option at the bottom of each response to double check with Google. If Gemini finds Internet sources that seem to correspond with its output, it will link to them, allowing you to check for yourself.

If you use Gemini as your phone assistant on Android, it will outsource a large number of tasks through the Gemini extensions. Things like timers and device settings were until recently handled by a Google Assistant extension, but more recently that's been replaced by a Utilities extension. Meanwhile, a Google Home extension is used for smart home tasks. In my testing, I found the current implementation to work reasonably well most of the time. However, it can easily get confused in edge cases. When I asked Gemini to tell me what summers are like in Paraguay, it told me, "I cannot set timers longer than one minute." Not only is that a non-sequitur, it's a bald-faced lie. It absolutely can set timers for far longer, and routinely does so when it's not hallucinating.

Meanwhile, Google has spent years integrating those functions directly into Assistant. If you tell it to set a timer, it does so every time. Ask it to add a calendar appointment, call your mom, or turn on your phone's flashlight, and it complies without hesitation. Gemini, by contrast, has a decently high chance of trying to tell me the history of calendars or explaining  — incorrectly  — the electric circuit that makes up a flashlight.

However, for more abstract tasks, Gemini becomes much more useful. I know that I type a certain number of words per-minute, so I asked Gemini to figure out how long it would take me to type three pages, then told it to set a timer for that length. It fought me initially, telling me it couldn't "set timers for dangerous activities." But after I reminded it writing is only occasionally dangerous, it admitted to having its "wires crossed" and did as requested.

Only about a year ago, Gemini could not control smart home devices, at least in my testing. However, it has made tremendous progress in that time thanks to the dedicated Google Home extension, and now seems quite reliable, at least in my relatively dense smart home environment. Dozens of lights, smart sensors, thermostats, locks, and more all work seamlessly when I command them using Gemini on my phone or tablet.

However, Assistant remains a hair faster for these tasks. Using a stopwatch and accounting for reflex time, I measured that it took roughly 2 seconds longer for my lights to respond to commands given using Gemini, with a 1.17-second delay for Assistant and a 3.24-second delay for Gemini. My assumption is that the extra time comes from Assistant processing the command and recognizing that it needs to turn the task over to the Google Home extension. Once it invokes the extension, the lights switch on more or less instantly.

Beyond voice commands, there are slight differences in how the two bots present smart home interfaces. For queries like, "Is my front door locked," Gemini sent me to the control page for that lock in the Google Home app, whereas Assistant told me, "The Front Door – Lock is locked," and gave me an embedded control switch for that device. However, when controlling the lights as described above, both bots gave me embedded controls.

One of the biggest limitations of Gemini compared to Google Assistant at time of writing is its lack of device support. Google built so much of its smart device ecosystem on the back of Assistant, and the older bot is consequently baked into everything from Google Nest speakers and displays to even third party devices. I control much of my smart home from a Google Assistant equipped JBL speaker located in my bedroom, for example, and have Nest Mini speakers dotted around the rest of my apartment. None of those devices are capable of running Gemini, and it would be shocking if they ever were.

Partially, this is because Google didn't really plan on releasing much of the tech that became Gemini to the public until its hand was forced by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT. We know Google had been experimenting with generative AI for years before the current craze, but instead of dumping entire models before the public eye, it had instead been slowly trickling more useful features into its products. For example, the Magic Eraser photo editing tool which uses generative fill to remove things from photos was launched in 2021, far before ChatGPT was made public.

It's unclear whether everyone locked into Google's smart ecosystem will eventually have to toss out their current Assistant-equipped speakers in favor of some as yet unannounced replacement product. Given what has happened to other depreciated Google products like Stadia and Google Play Music, such a scenario would be unsurprising.

It's clear that Assistant is best for certain phone and smart home related tasks simply because it was built with them in mind. However, one thing Assistant (and other smartphone assistants like Siri) has never been good at is conversation. Sure, you can prompt it to tell you a joke, a fun fact, or to play a parlor game  — you can even ask follow up questions, like asking about the height of a basketball player and then asking how many points they've scored this season  — but that's as far as things go. Gemini, on the other hand, will happily chat away with you all day.

Of course, you can use Gemini like any other large language model chatbot, asking it follow up questions or switching topics as frequently as you like. There are limitations, of course, since Gemini will sometimes decline to talk directly about politics (strangely, it will balk even at requests to talk about past politics  — it wouldn't tell me what Barack Obama's biggest legislative accomplishments were, for instance), and you cannot discuss other taboo topics relating to criminal activity, prurient interest, and so on.

Gemini also has a live conversation feature called Gemini Live, which is basically like being on a phone call with Google's AI. You can have real time, free-flowing conversations. This feature works for the most part, although common AI frustrations are no less present. You'll encounter plenty of false statements (talk to it about your field of expertise and see for yourself), and although Gemini is getting better at remembering context, it still sometimes forgets what you're talking about mid-conversation or goes off on a bizarre, unrelated tangent.

The big AI buzzword of 2025 is "agentic AI," and if you haven't heard the term thrown around yet, prepare yourself. Simply put, an agentic AI can do things on your behalf, autonomously. Gemini 2.0 is the company's agentic model, and it's out now. As an example of what agentic AI enables, you can tell Gemini 2.0, "Find a recipe for chicken teriyaki and put it in a note for me." The AI will happily create a note along those lines. However, you need to be careful here. After I got a recipe that vaguely resembled chicken teriyaki but didn't seem quite right, Gemini confirmed it had created a Frankensteinian teriyaki recipe using multiple different food blogs. I asked again, specifying, "Do not use multiple sources. Just use a single, highly ranked recipe online and copy it verbatim into a note." This time, it worked, though I'm now left wondering how the owner of that food blog feels about having their recipe intercepted by AI, which causes them to miss out on the ad revenue I would have provided by visiting the website myself.

In any case, there are uses for agentic AI in Gemini which don't involve dubious uses of scraped Internet data. If you're on some of the newest Android devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, you can hook Gemini into your calendar, Gmail, Spotify, and more for agentic tasks. It's as hit and miss as anything else, though. When I asked it to find the closest coffee shop to me and set a 3pm meeting with a friend there, Gemini didn't invite the friend to the meeting, and it humorously labeled the location as "Coffee Shop" rather than finding an actual place to meet up.

When it comes down to choosing between these two Google smart assistants, Google Assistant represents the stable past, while Gemini harkens toward a shaky future. The question is whether you'd rather have a smart assistant that's very reliable for a small set of everyday tasks, or one that's a jack of all trades but a master of none. Blue pill, or slightly weirder, bluer pill. At least for the time being, most users probably don't want to be constantly surprised by Gemini's madcap interpretations of their requests, and if you're among them, you should probably stick with Assistant. Frankly, the error rate on Gemini is still too high for this writer, who just wants to get things done and keep on moving.

On the other hand, if you're the sort of person who loves to embrace the bleeding edge of tech, no matter how experimental, then you'll love playing around with the infinite possibilities enabled by Gemini. From the ability to have long conversations on a wide range of subjects to agentic capabilities that will let you accomplish multi-step tasks with a single command, Gemini is far more powerful when it actually works. If you can put up with the error rate, and if you're willing to double check that the information it gives you is accurate, Gemini does indeed feel like the future of digital assistance AI. However, given the pace at which it's progressed in just the past year, expect Gemini to keep on getting better. Even if you stick with Assistant for now, it's worth checking out Gemini every so often, just to see if it's finally ready for you.