I tested Gemini 3 and ChatGPT 5.1 head-to-head on what really matters (www.techradar.com)

In a side-by-side practical test of everyday prompts—gift shopping, an eighth‑grade science explainer, a Montreal weekend itinerary, smart‑home troubleshooting, and bedtime parenting help—Google’s Gemini 3 and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.1 both showed major strides toward sounding like natural conversational partners rather than rote answer machines. Gemini 3 leaned toward crisp, organized, utility‑first responses (and added multimodal assets like images and a YouTube link for the photosynthesis task), while ChatGPT 5.1 favored warmer pacing, analogies, and an emotional throughline that made suggestions feel more person‑to‑person. Both asked clarifying questions, provided structured checklists or itineraries, and avoided factual stumbles across the prompts. For the AI/ML community this matters because the battleground is shifting from raw capability to user experience: tone, multimodality, and dialogue management now determine adoption. Technically, the comparison highlights improvements in intent understanding, contextual style shaping, and integration of non‑text outputs (diagrams, videos). The takeaway: differences are stylistic “accents” rather than capability gaps—choice will likely come down to preferred voice, multimodal needs, and ecosystem ties, and competition between Google and OpenAI will push faster iteration on naturalness, alignment, and real‑world usability.