If you’ve had a passing interest in Apple over the past year, you’ve likely heard of the company’s struggles in the AI race. Apple Intelligence, which arrived slightly late after the launch of the iPhone 16, fell short of expectations, and Apple has yet to deliver the much-improved Siri it promised at WWDC 2024. Siri got a new look and an integration with ChatGPT, but its ability to understand your personal context via emails, messages, notes, and calendar was “indefinitely” delayed earlier this year as Apple is reportedly facing several challenges.

Even if Apple delivered a better Siri, would people use it? Despite arriving first, Siri has long been derided by iPhone owners, often the butt of a joke, as Google Assistant and Alexa rose to the top. But if Apple wants its customers to take the supposed improvements coming to the voice assistant seriously, it should consider taking a page from Google and killing it off for something new.

Google has no problem with pulling the plug when things aren’t working, or priorities change. In fact, the search giant has a history of killing so many of its services that there’s a website dedicated to tracking all the gravestones. One of its most recent terminations? Google Assistant.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Nearly 10 years since its debut, Google Assistant is in the process of being phased out from every ecosystem it was a part of. Wear OS smartwatches? It’s being replaced soon. Android Auto? In the coming months. It’s already no longer the default assistant on Android phones. By 2026, it’s unlikely we’ll see the branding anywhere anymore. So ends the reign of arguably the most effective voice assistant of its time, gone without a care in the world.

But Google’s decision to kill it, instead of keeping the Google Assistant name, may have been smart. “It’s primarily branding,” says Chris Harrison, who directs the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. “But it underlines a technology reason, which is that the previous generation of these assistants really weren’t very much like assistants. Asking for the weather and setting a timer—not very sophisticated. You wouldn’t really ask a personal assistant for those mundane tasks.”

Gemini is completely different. It can rummage through your emails to find the location of your kid’s soccer match, parse through large documents, and when paired with a camera-enabled device, can understand what you’re seeing and offer help. Its capabilities are vastly superior to what Google Assistant could do. Apple’s goal is to achieve similar results in a more privacy-friendly way—so that when you have Siri connect to ChatGPT, your data is not passed off to OpenAI.

“Apple thought Siri’s capabilities would grow, but that didn’t really materialize; Siri kind of atrophied out of the gate,” Harrison says. “Now, we’re in this new generation of things that are really much more like assistants—they can do reasoning, personalization.” But while Google Assistant and Gemini both have voice interfaces, and at a first glance, they may share a similar look, they’re two different applications. “Simply renaming it Google Assistant 2.0 would not spur people to use it in a fundamentally different way.” It seems that switch to Gemini has been key to moving customer understanding along.