Google's artificial-intelligence-based Assistant is on more than 100 million devices now, and the company is leveraging a longtime competitor to expand the technology to even more people.

At its developer conference overnight, Google said it's launching the Assistant as an app for Apple's iPhone, and that it will support many of the same functions as the service does on Google devices.

Users will be able to integrate with Gmail and complete various tasks through voice commands, Google said. The application will become available first for users in the US and support English. Other countries and languages will come later. This means users on iPhone will now be able to choose between Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana or Google's Assistant for the voice-activated assistant needs.

The announcement heralds a step by Google, whose Android system runs on the majority of the world's smartphones, to get a foothold on Apple's phones, which have smaller market share but are used by people who tend to spend more on technology.

It comes as Google, Apple and Amazon are competing to establish the dominant voice-powered digital assistant, which many in the industry believe will supplant keyboards and touch screens as a primary way that users interact with technology.

Speaking at the conference, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai touted the company's progress with the Google Assistant, which pulls on Google's massive bank of user data to provide relevant information and suggestions.

"Humans are interacting with computing in more natural and immersive ways," he said. "We've been using voice as an input across many of our products. We've had significant breakthroughs."

Google also discussed a software development kit for the Assistant, which will allow third-party hardware makers to integrate the tool into their own products. Google said the expansion of the Assistant to the iPhone and various other third-party products should increase its reach beyond the current 100 million devices.

The Assistant can now converse in French, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese. By the end of the year, the system will understand Italian, Spanish and Korean, Google said.

Agencies