Publishing papers and sponsoring research conferences? My impression of apple research has always been to keep it inside and not really join the public discourse
I guess in Machine Learning fields you will need these papers to prove your worth, not to mention the continuous improvement in ML across the whole industry. So after a few years Apple relented and allow them to publish these papers.
This slight changes of attitude has some effect on other department as well, including security research where now Apple at least participate in certain events.
Also wouldn't mind being able just use Google's assistant natively...
I think if Siri got direct web answers working reliably (currently being tested in Spotlight search) then the two assistants would be comparably useful.
What I really want tho is transcription for more languages. Google has an API for that, just let people use it...