We’re upgrading Google Assistant users on mobile to Gemini, offering a new kind of help only possible with the power of AI.
I find Gemini has better communication and comprehension ability compared with assistant, but can do even less when it comes to controlling the phone. No reminders, no calendar events, no messages, no integration with anything. Just talking.
I would have preferred assistant talk and understand better, instead of a completly gimped alternative that does that and nothing more.
Integrations with the phone’s functionality is key. I don’t care how clever the brain is, it needs to talk to the rest of the body.
I’m somewhat of a boomer, what sort of things can you do through assistant?
Set or change alarms, add reminders to your calendar, ask about those things, send text messages, start phone calls, have it read out last text messages received.
When I was a truck driver, my wife could test me, and I could just listen to a transcript of what she sent instead of calling her and asking what she typed.
“Hey Google, read my last text”
“Hey Google, send a text to <wife>, 'Quit texting me while I’m driving, woman!” Stuff like that. 🤣
Usually quick things in the car when I don’t have hands.
- Ask about weather
- Set a reminder
- Reply to a text
I use it to set reminders and alarms. I don’t keep the “OK google” stuff on, I just hold the power button for a second or two until the assistant pops up (or at least used to, I haven’t done it in a while so I’m not sure if it’s stupid gemini now instead), then just say like, “remind me friday at 3pm to call the doctor” and it does it.
Mine does reminders and events now. It can also do Google home stuff.
Exactly, and maybe I’m a outlier, but I have no intention of speaking to my device like it’s a human. Ever.
If this is pushed through a silent update then I’ll use adb to remove it. I don’t need a useless ai assistant hogging precious memory.
I feel bad for for the folks who have their phone gimped overnight and they won’t have a clue why no clue why. So many people with older phones are going to need to upgrade their phone because of this forced update. Talk about e-waste.
It probably already is. AICore is a service thats been getting snuck on the andoids for a couple of months, ever since AndroidSystemSafety was push on silently, which is effectively like recall and scans all your photos and files in the background.
Thanks for letting know about system safety, I just removed it. Play store said my xperia isn’t compatible with AICore so I got lucky with that. Wish I could switch to lineage buty bootloader is locked.
Anything else I should remove?
deleted by creator
I miss now on tap
Gemini works as a general search engine, but it’s trash at everything else.
Gemini might be good at something, but I’ll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it’s good at anything at all, it’s something I don’t need or want.
Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today’s Google Assistant, totally different product).
Seriously, I tried Gemini for a while but it is mostly useless. It can it open my apps, cannot control Home Assistant, cannot send a message to someone.
Yeah, it has a total lack of any of the integrations that made Assistant actually useful.
Even if an LLM offers meaningful improvements on the core conversational elements of Assistant, launching it without all the needed integrations is idiotic and completely hamstrings the functionality.
I swapped to Gemini for a month or two. Kept thinking to myself “maybe I’m not speaking clearly,” and other justifications. Turns out it just sucks. Now I just do everything manually. Fuck em.
Also except my Pixel running Graphene OS.
Well, too bad, i have replaced Google on my phone.
What setup you currently running?
GrapheneOS is the only one that can really sever the Google connection. LineageOS is kind of a halfway point but still relies on an amount of Google to function.
Once again, thank goodness for GrapheneOS.
Never have I appreciated not having features so much.
Seriously considering this for my next phone. I currently have a Pixel 6, so I’m thinking I’ll get another Pixel, try grapheneOS on the 6 to get comfortable with it, before doing it to the new phone.
Is there a viable replacement to google assistant that’s self hosted or local?
Home assistant
Will they hold the power button hostage again?
Yes
Good thing I never used Google Assistant then.
I actually use it a bunch for setting reminders and it does pretty good at that.
For sure, but I am also capable of doing that with my thumbs… which is what I do.
I feel bad for visually impaired.
Astute point, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater here and hurting the disabled community to push their inferior product that nobody really asked for.
Just because I don’t use it doesn’t mean others who need it also don’t.
It happens, we forget the sheet diversity of experiences because we’re human. I try to have multiperspectivity, but even that is limited to one’s own experiences and imaginative abilities, on the best days.
I feel jealous for the hearing impaired. Just think of everyone and they’re dog showing off how dumb it is all the time.
Or people who don’t have, or have lost, motor function in their hands.
Same here. Really looking forward to not using their new product. How exciting.
When your hands are wet or you can’t grab your phone…the one thing I used Google assistant for, Gemini can’t do.
If you still have Google Assistant, it will tell you it can’t set an alarm, and then tell you to try setting an alarm using Google Assistant
Didn’t read the article and I haven’t really used Android in a almost a decade, but aren’t most android devices on seriously old versions and sold with 2GB RAM or less. Or are shit Android devices less common nowadays?
Last time I seriously considered an Android device was 8ish years ago and devices running Android 2 were still being sold new.
My old, crappy phone that retailed for $250 (got for much cheaper) had 4GB RAM (released 2019 or 2020), and my current one has 8GB RAM. The one before that had 2GB IIRC, and was released around 2017, and it was crappy for the time.
Modern barrel bottom Android phones in the past few years require an ARM64 system, and come with minimum 4GB / 64GB RAM and Storage. Good phones will have 8, 12, even 16 GB RAM and up to 1TB Storage.
🤣 Gemini is the worst of all the ais. It can’t even do the most basic shit like set reminders.
Google has fallen so hard. They are just pure ad garbage now.
Timers are literally the only thing I use it for.
I use Google Assistant a lot. I tried the Gemini Assistant on my phone and it was an exercise in frustration.
Me: (after pausing the tv) “Resume TV”
Google: (resumes playback on TV)
Gemini: “TV not recognised. Please say the device name” or even worse… “A resume is essential when you’re looking for a job in television. Your resume should blah blah…”
Me: (with phone locked) “set a timer for xxx”
Google: “setting a timer for xxx, starting now”
Gemini: “I’m unable to set timers, please unlock your phone, open xxx and (lengthy step by step instructions)”, or “setting a timer for yyy” (completely wrong time).
They activated Gemini at work to auto-complete stuff in emails. I work in IT, and I was not aware of that. I was typing the sentence “we will need some help” and was about to add “in the project blah blah” but Gemini came with its amazing auto-completion and added something like “in the street where they sell sausages”.
AI was a mistake, and I didn’t use it since that day. Waste of time, waste of everything.
