The Gemini on Android reality
The truth is that using Gemini as an assistant on Android, to borrow a phrase from my wise progeny, still sucks. And it’s not because its generative AI parlor tricks aren’t up to snuff. That stuff — all the new tricks Gemini brings to the table — honestly doesn’t matter all that much for most of us in this context.
As I mused a couple months back:
When it comes to an on-demand mobile device assistant, we don’t need the ability to have mediocre text or creepy images created for us from anywhere across Android. We need a fast, consistent, reliable system for interacting with our phone and other connected devices, getting things accomplished with our core productivity services, and getting short bursts of basic info spoken aloud to us in response to simple questions.
What Google’s scrambling to do now is catch Gemini up with those foundational basics — the table stakes, in other words, and the bare minimum of what makes for an effective and reliable phone assistant. And while it may be making impressive strides toward that goal, in the meantime, Gemini continues to fail at the core tasks we actually need from a service of this nature while also continuing to be pushed as a default for more and more people who never asked for it. And at the same time, Assistant itself — thanks to its apparent abandonment within Google — is also now flailing at those same tasks, which it once handled handily.
