Introduction
Why does Google insist on making it’s assistant situation so bad?
In theory, assistant should be the best it’s ever been. It’s better at “understanding” what I ask for, and yet it less capable than ever to do so.
This post is a rant about my experience using modern assistants on Android, and why, while I used to use these features actively in the mid-to-late-2010s, I now don’t even bother with them.
The task
Back in the late 2010s, I used to be able to hold the home button and ask the Google Assistant to create an event based on this email. It would grab the context from my screen, and do exactly that. This has been impossible, as far as I can tell, to do for years now.
Trying to find the “right” assistant
At some point, my phone stopped responding to “OK Google”. I still don’t know why it won’t work.
Holding down the Home bar (the home button went the way of the dodo) brings up an assistant-style UI, but it’s dumb as bricks and only Googles the web. Useless.
So, I installed Gemini. I asked it to perform a basic task. It responded “in live mode, I cannot do that”. Asking it how I can get it to create me a calendar event, it could not answer the question. Saying instead to open my calendar app and create a new event. I know how to use a calendar. I want it to justify its existence by providing more value than a Google search. It was ultimately unable to answer the question.
Searching the internet, apparently both of the ways I had been using assistant features were the wrong way to do it. You have to hold down the power button, that’s how to launch the proper one. My internal response was:
No, that’s for the power menu. I don’t want to dedicate it to Assistant.
Well, apparently, that’s the only way to do it now, so there I go sacrificing another convenience turning it on.
Pulling teeth with Gemini
So I ask this power-menu-version of Gemini to do the same simple task. I tried 4 separate times.
First, it created a random event “Meeting with a client” on a completely different day (what?).
Second time it just crashed with an error.
The third time, it asked me which email to use, giving me a list, but that list did not contain the email I was interested in. I asked it to find the Royal Mail one. No success.
So, quite clearly, it wasn’t using screen content.
I rephrased the question: “Please create an event from the content on my screen”. It replied “Sure, when’s this for?”
I shouldn’t have to tell you. That’s the point. It’s right there.
Conclusion
There are too many damn assistant versions, and they are all bad. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to also have Bixby in the mix as a Samsung user. (Feel free to let me know below.)
It seems like none of them are able to pull context from what you are doing anymore, and you’ll spend more time fiddling and googling how to make them work than it would take for you to do the task yourself.
In some ways, assistants have gotten worst than almost 10 years ago, despite billions in investments.
As a little bonus, the internet is filled with AI slop that makes finding out real facts, real studies from real people harder than ever.
I write this all mostly to blow off steam, as this stuff has been frustrating me for years now. Let me know what your experience has been like below, I could use some camaraderie.
Oh boy! Finally I can share my experiences with Gemini. One day it just replaced my Google Assistant which I used on my phone to quickly search simple queries, setting timers and alarms and not much more.
One day I asked for a simple search for synonyms of “oddball”, noticed the Assistant was replaced and asked why. Proof these are my first interactions from my history:
here’s its response, with casual admission to copyright infringement highlighted by me:
and when I said I don’t care and asked about Assistant again, it of course being the genius that it is, didn’t even make a connection to the context (very conversational indeed) and acted like I was asking about what happened to Assistant like I was looking for tech support:
when I asked about the voice it failed to tell me that it had many different voices I could choose from, literally one of the most basic things it could tell me about itself:
also demonstrating how incredibly unnecessarily verbose it is about everything. Google Assistant was much more concise.
so here’s my next few questions, the responses are BS so they don’t matter:
then I asked what’s different about it and it outright lied about things it already demonstrated to be false:
Enhanced Understanding and Advanced Reasoning already proven wrong by treating my question about Assistant as a tech support question rather than a question about why it was replaced by Gemini.
Enhanced Factual Knowledge proven wrong by not even having basic knowledge about itself. Demonstrated above that I asked about the voice and all it could say was “if you don’t like it sorry” rather than tell me it already had options for different voices.
This is too long and I’m just starting. Will continue in replies…
because it said “these are just a few examples” and it said nothing of value so far, I wanted more:
I was baffled that it had no contextual clues about what I said, mind that the non-AI Assistant was usually good at this. And once again, unnecessarily verbose answer, and treating my question as a tech support problem:
Here it is telling me that I should provide context each time like a fucking idiot because that’s how intelligence works, right?
Then I pointed out this is objectively worse than Assistant and it replied with a fucking essay. Please don’t read this.
I’ll just provide TLDR- both have different strengths. Google Assistant is better at things that are useful and Gemini is better at things that don’t fucking matter at all:
I asked a couple more questions about Assistant’s advantages over Gemini. It barely understood but essentially reiterated that Assistant was just better at things that are useful. So I asked more hoping for more complex things AI could do:
The answer is no, and instead it wrote me another fucking essay that I’ll skip here, about different apps I could use for automation like IFTTT. Because that’s what I want an assistant for, to tell me go do things myself.
I still wanted to see if I could make use of things so I kept it for a while. It answered some simple questions about synonyms and meanings of words. I like this one in particular:
anyway this is basically the end of the introductory period. I’ll continue with a reply for the actual meat.
Yeah this is emblematic of modern LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT. Needlessly verbose, confidently wrong, less capable of actually doing things.