If you needed any reference as to how far behind Apple currently is in the ongoing AI race, look no further than the minuscule AI capabilities that the iPhone maker just rolled out with much fanfare for its Apple Music app, and then compare them with Google's latest model that is now creating entire tracks from scratch.
Apple Music now uses AI to create playlists as Google's models are now building entire 30-second song tracks
As we noted recently, with the iOS 26.4 update, the Apple Music app will let you create a playlist with a text-based prompt. Basically, you can explain your idea or a specific theme in words, and the app will use AI to automatically curate a list of matching songs.
Meanwhile, Google has just unveiled its Lyria 3 model, which uses either a text-based or an image-based prompt to create 30-second tracks. Google goes on to note:
"Just describe an idea or upload a photo, like "a comical R&B slow jam about a sock finding their match" and in a matter of seconds, Gemini will translate it into a high-quality, catchy track. To push the creative envelope further, you can even ask Gemini to take inspiration from something you upload."
Of course, Lyria 3 is currently in its beta phase. Even so, the contrast between Google's rapidly expanding AI capabilities and Apple's corresponding 'baby steps' could not be starker.
One can only hope that Apple will be able to bridge its chronic AI-related shortcomings once the revamped Gemini-backed Siri launches sometime this year, bringing the much-delayed in-app actions, personal context awareness, and on-screen awareness to the voice assistant, thereby enabling a wide variety of agentic actions across apps, based on personal data and on-screen content.
Here too, however, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman recently pointed out that Apple's planned launch of a revamped Siri has hit snags, with the Cupertino giant now working to gradually roll out the underlying features over the course of the ongoing year instead of in one go.
Substantial improvements, however, are now only expected with iOS 27, when Apple would launch a dedicated Siri chatbot that would run on Google's own TPUs and cloud infrastructure, possibly leased by Apple.
The chatbot Siri would reportedly leverage a much more advanced version of Google's Gemini model, known internally as Apple Foundation Models version 11. The model is expected to be competitive with Gemini 3 and significantly more capable than the one powering the revamped Siri.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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