This literally happened to me today while driving
Me: Text wife Gemini: Texting wife, what would you like in the message? Me: Can you pop my lunch in the microwave? I am going to be home in 5 minutes. Gemini: While I can’t put food in the microwave for you, I can set a reminder.
What the fuck?
Today was the first day I noticed Gemini instead of assistant, and from the other complaints here, I am not looking forward this. Assistant worked just fine.
Honestly I don’t understand how Google is such a valuable company. They are absolutely useless for so much shit.
It’s really bad.
Breaking news, google spyware removed in favour of another google slop spyware
Can the Gemini assistant set reminders yet? Such a basic function of the old Google assistant and yet Gemini has failed every time I tried it in the past
F: play Spotify (activated by multi button on headset)
A: Please unlock your phone yada yada yadaBRO! GUESS WHY I USED THE MULTI-BUTTON >:( I CAN’T USE MY HANDS TO UNLOCK IT AND PLAY MUSIC MANUALLY.
Because it doesn’t know what time is or how to measure it or even how to count for that matter.
It’s been abled to set alarms for me haven’t tried reminders. I also use it to create events from me on my calendar.
It connects to my Google home now too, which it wasn’t able to do before
Assistant tasks like this are probably the only semi reasonable LLM use case. If it was less resource intensive anyway
You don’t really need a powerful LLM for personal assistant tasks.
Even the small ones are resource hogs.
That’s fine. Google devices have been disappearing from my life as well, so this will not be a long-term problem.
Well this fucking sucks. Gemini is complete garbage in Android Auto, I thought I was stuck with it until I discovered a couple weeks ago that I could choose to continue using the assistant.
Now it’s being ripped from my hands again.
This is total ass. Fuck Gemini. Fuck AI. Fuck Google.
Gemini is complete garbage in Android Auto
It also can’t read labels on gmaps. Can’t read people’s “nickname” field in contacts (there are so many Roberts). And can’t access or write notes without also requiring access to my emails (hell no).
Those are the three things I use AA for, and it’s objectively worse at every single one of them.
I couldn’t get it to create a reminder for me when I tried the other day.
Worse.
It will fucking lie and say it set a timer or reminder, and if you ask it “wtf” in response when it clearly didn’t (if you notice), it’ll fucking explain it’s just roleplaying at being a voice assistant.
I have a Google Nest speaker in my kitchen and while cooking “Hey Google set a timer for 5 minutes” … “I cannot do that at this time”
“Ask me again in 5 minutes.”
If it makes you feel better, I’m sure someone in Google got the promotion they so desperately needed.
Oh for sure. They can proudly tell their shareholders that every one is using Gemini now, which I’m sure they’ll eat that up even though we’re all being forced into it with no recourse.
“Look, everyone is using YouTube Music! We are successful and smart!” [because we shut down Google Play Music and forced users to install YouTube Music, and measured the stats before they all uninstalled it]
I use GA to spell shit for me because I have senior moments. It’s just easier to click a button and say spell naseaous for me.
See? Fuck that word. Also fuck Google. For more reasons than just this.
Because it makes you feel sick, in so many words?
Fuck everything about this: Gemini sucks!
OMFG.
Gemini is neat, but it SSUUUUUUUUCCCKKS at being a voice assistant.
It will frequently produce a fucking essay in response to being asked to turn the lights on or off.
I just gave it a go again, 30% of the time it pretends to do what you ask without actually doing it. 20% of the time it flat-out refuses while never failing to mention that I really should enable gemini activity tracking. 40% of the time is claims this functionality does not exist, even though it was given the ability to “ask assistant” to do things only it can do (like identify music by listening to it). 10% of the time it will successfully hand off to assistant, which will then instantly do as asked.
The problem is Google is treating all those functions (“tool calling”) as just any other response, they didn’t even bother training the model to recognize and process the requests properly using the tools. They did the Google thing of just putting the function in and calling a day and forgetting about it.
So without proper reinforcement learning it responds with the same casual randomized answer-shaped sequence of words as ever, you’re just lucky if the part of it that knows to look up the tool call instructions responds, and luckier if it does it right AND submit the tool call formatted right. If it forgets to look up it’s tool call instructions, it might randomly tell you it can’t do it because you got an answer from a part of the network trained on data from when there weren’t models that could.
Fixed that for you
Gemini
is heat, but itSSUUUUUUUUCCCKKS
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
Assistant was awesome. The voice isn’t as punchable as Gemini’s options.
I took an online course sponsored by Google years ago, when AI was but a twinkle in tech bros’ eyes, and one of the Gemini voices is 1000% the presenter of that course.
To preserve our privacy? (insert Padmé and Anakin stare meme)
My grandmother used it for calling. She’d long press the home button and say ‘Call Aliya’ etc. It has stopped working last week, in both google assistant and gemini. If anyone knows an alternative, please let me know.
You might have to remap the home button to Gemini maybe?
Tried that but gemini seems incapable of placing calls
It also can’t connect to Google home without being unlocked nor set your navigation to an address in your contacts, or as far as I can tell do anything useful at all.
Oh and I almost forgot it will also fucking block other apps from doing shit that they used to be able to do because it decided that something in your phrase is a key word.
Seems to be a case of dumb incentives winning. If you evolve the google assistant to be more powerful, it’s a “small” quite project, but you build a big foundational replacement and wow promotion
Just… perfect Google. Bravo.
What even is ownership?
Local-first for life.
That sucks. At least it was useful unlike gemini.
I degoogled (mostly) a while ago, but home assistant has a pretty configurable local voice assistant. If you have remote access to your server, I imagine you could cobble together a good keyword based personal assistant that sets alarms, turns lights on and off, and reads you an RSS newsfeed while you drink your morning coffee.
We’re truly on the technological downslope now. First it was all about the user and making software accomplish a purpose, then it was all about the user as long as it was profitable, now it’s fuck the user - be profitable.
Personally I went out of my way to put physical buttons around my house so I can use Home Assistant automations without talking. It has the added bonus that guests can just turn the lights on and off without a tutorial.
Bilresa buttons from IKEA are a blessing. Cheap, (currently) work with ZigBee and ridiculously simple to set up. I can talk to Home Assistant, but never do.
I had everything either automated or timed but the ladies wanted a physical button in the bathroom. Ok I put one in, then they kept leaving the light on so I had to put in a 15 min timer. Buttons have their places. I also prefer not talking to it.
I get a lot done with physical buttons and time / condition automations but sometimes it’s nice to just do a one off action from the couch.
I’ve built some md5stack little speaker things and they work okay. Weird audio artifacts sometimes though.
It can definitely come in handy. Although I went as far as leaving a wireless Zigbee button by my couch so I can dim the lights or toggle power on my AV stuff without getting up. I haven’t replaced the battery yet, and it’s been 2 years.
I’m working on a project using esp32s to build my own Hal9000 system. Every room will have a small touch screen where you can control stuff in the room, but the screen saver will be HAL
I’m sorry, Village, I’m afraid you can’t do that.
Wake words are a pain on android but everything else is very doable. I use my local assistant everyday.
