I tried it out for a while and yes, it really is as bad as the article implies. I gave it a fair chance for a few weeks and then went back to the old assistant (a task which which gemini was also completely unable to help me with, at one point even gaslighting me and saying I wasn’t using Gemini).
It’s kind of crazy to think about but it seems like Google is just somehow really terrible at AI
It’s the normal corporate lifecycle. Founders build it up. Workers expand it. Suits take over to monetize everything. A private equity firms squeezes the last life out of it.
The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).
Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.
They should have just merged the two products. Instead of coming up with Gemini, they could have added LLM features to the Assistant. On a Samsung phone, you now have Bixby, Assistant and Gemini lol.
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I tried it out for a while and yes, it really is as bad as the article implies. I gave it a fair chance for a few weeks and then went back to the old assistant (a task which which gemini was also completely unable to help me with, at one point even gaslighting me and saying I wasn’t using Gemini).
It’s kind of crazy to think about but it seems like Google is just somehow really terrible at AI
It is SO shit! I can’t even turn off a light while talking to it through my earbuds! It just forces me to take my phone out and unlock it.
It’s time to start calling it something else. Google is dead.
Was it ever truly alive? Yes. For one magical summer.
It’s the normal corporate lifecycle. Founders build it up. Workers expand it. Suits take over to monetize everything. A private equity firms squeezes the last life out of it.
Go go enshittification!
The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).
Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.
More and more you all prove to me that you don’t actually use the products.
They should have just merged the two products. Instead of coming up with Gemini, they could have added LLM features to the Assistant. On a Samsung phone, you now have Bixby, Assistant and Gemini lol.
Why does google feel like they’re playing squid games inside the company? Just with AI overlords besides the rich psychopaths.
I can’t set a reminder. It was all I used the damn thing for before.
Google set a reminder
Nope now it won’t Whats the point ugh