To save you all some time, this is the poll.
“Aren’t sold yet” from the title seems to imply the yellow section, not the red. Almost as if it’s going to be shoved down our throat no matter how we feel about it. Not that there’s been any doubt about that, but the article title is certainly telling about the bias of this article…
“Aren’t sold” would be the yellow plus the red. It doesn’t imply that they are still open to being sold on it.
I never wanted AI on my phone, period. I don’t care which one. The Google Assistant was more than enough, if not too much. Never got asked if I wanted any of this shit, it was just forcefully added into every fucking thing.
My old ass phone, Google pushed out AI. (I plan to swap to GrapheneOS soon). It’s less useful than Assistant. And features are disappearing.
My Windows 10 PC… fucking AI added. To be honest, never opened it.
Because I use Android Auto when driving, technically, thanks to Google, I have AI there too. And as stated, it’s less functional than the original assistant.
Drive-thru… AI. It’s slower and less accurate than a person. Only upside, because it doesn’t have a budget mic from the 1980’s it’s clearer than a person.
Work… AI. Co-Pilot for VSCode, as a tool, it’s fine, get’s a lot wrong. But I had some upper manager claim they recreated DoorDash in like 5 minutes with AI (clearly they didn’t). We just had a recent wave of layoffs (I survived). But they are monitoring AI usage to ensure we use enough per month…
News?.. AI. Both good or bad news about it, I’m just so fucking sick of the exact same things. Trump, AI, Trump, AI, Trump, AI… that’s all it is, all the time. Just how both are fucking everyone.
About 30% of my interactions with Google assistant were me asking for a joke, 20% ended in frustration that it didn’t accomplish whatever task I hoped to do hands-free, 40% getting pissed at it responding to “okay” when it wasn’t supposed to and 10% that it didn’t respond when I wanted it to.
Eventually I turned off the voice activation entirely, and my number of interactions since has sharply decreased.
Now I’m throwing it out entirely.
But they are monitoring AI usage to ensure we use enough per month…
Tokenmaxxing for the win
I had some upper manager claim they recreated DoorDash in like 5 minutes with AI
lol k
Eh, I use Gemini to project manage my little herb garden. Low stakes, well trodden ground. It was the kind of thing I knew LLMs could handle for stuff I do know about, so I’m trusting it for something I don’t know about.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if my herbs live or die, I know I’ll kill them on my own though. Gardening isn’t a skill I want to actively acquire, I just want the herbs. It (the garden) is doing fine. I had some yellow leaves, the bot said to top dress it, I did, no more yellow leaves. So far so good.
Anything beyond the well trodden LLMs are shit at though. I tried to use it to find a specific motorcycle part, discontinued by the manufacturer: it couldn’t. When I wanted it to shop for me, it failed. It seems to be doing well managing this non-commercial project for me.
With sick Pam Bondi on the White House’s new advisory council on AI, Android users are right to avoid Gemini.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. AI can eat the entirety of my arse.
That’s alright, they’ll suck it up eventually. Along with ‘age control’ de-anonymization.
Signed, GrapheneOS user.
Well yeah my limited experience is an android auto update replaced Assistant with Gemini, and now it can’t do anything new, only the same things much slower and with occasional really weird results. Totally worth all the lay offs and resources hogging.
Yes it is much much slower. Ask to navigate it says checking maps or something for a while then does it. Old way it just happened.
Does anyone else notice AI just being referred to as “intelligence” in the media a lot now? Seems very sudden and very sus.
My guess is that’s apples fault. “Apple intelligence”
Gemini is fucking garbage, it’s useless as an assistant and Google destroyed Assistant which could do genuinely helpful things like navigate hands free, set timers reliably and without Internet connections, set calendar reminders, etc.
Try to use voice commands to navigate now?
Gemini tells you to use the Maps app.
Fuck you Gemini, that’s not helpful at all.
Get your shit together Google.
The funny thing is there’s no reason for it to be so shitty just because they use Gemini for it. LLMs can use tools if given access. There’s no reason they can’t give it a tool to use intents to launch activities. I can run their own open weight Gemma model in llama.cpp and I’m pretty sure it can call tools.
Lately I feel like Google or Microsoft could pay me like a million a year and I could single-handedly fix their most broken products and the AI doesn’t even have to go. Teams? Don’t care how much tracking they put in it, it can be made more performant and the UI can be made usable. Gemini? Could legitimately be fixed to do everything the old Google assistant did and more. Outlook though? Yeah that one has to go. No saving it anymore.
Add some keyword along the lines “Tell Google Assistant to…”
You can’t tell Google Assistant shit anymore, they killed it to force people to use Gemini, which is objectively terrible as an assistant.
I know, that’s why my suggestion for improving Gemini was that they should add an option to go back to Assistant.
Ah, I thought you meant as in tricking Gemini to use Assistant somehow. Yeah, that would be great. It’s insane they got rid of it at all but Google loves killing cool/useful shit.
I’m still salty about Photosphere.
Honestly, with all the salt I have about them, I’m worried about my kidneys. I had my gripes with Assistant and didn’t personally use it much, but for hands-free operation, for example listening and responding to text messages without having to look away from the road, it was really useful.
Recently, when my wife tried answering a message, her phone apparently just responded “You seem upset” and ended the conversation. I guess that was a self-fulfilling prophecy…
It’s really good at setting alarms. That’s all I’ve ever used it for. It sets multiple alarms so I don’t have to fiddle with the annoying alarm clock interface on my phone.
It has become reasonably OK at setting alarms somewhat recently, unless you don’t have Internet, then it is totally fucking useless. Assistant would reliably set alarms, no problem, along with a ton of other useful things like calendar events, reminders, texts, etc.
It would also set alarms without needing an Internet connection. Gemini is vastly inferior to Assistant when it comes to actually doing anything I want it to do.
I rely on Android Auto in my commute. A couple of weeks ago maps wasn’t displaying correctly, so I rebooted my phone. All of a sudden assistant was replaced… 30km later I pulled over and switched it back.
If I’m writing an SMS, I want it written, not start a dialogue with some temu hal9000 clone.
Gemini has now replaced the default “dumb” assistant in android auto. On my drive home from picking my daughter up from preschool, she wanted to listen to Golden from KPOP Demon Hunters. Gemini gave me several sentences about how much it liked the song, then asked if I needed anything else. Then it failed to actually start the song playing. Half of the time it assumes I’m asking it to play a video on YouTube and says it can’t do that while driving, so I have to specify to play using my music app.
And the irony is that it’s not even because LLMs can’t be used that way. LLMs can be given access to tools they can use and launching YouTube music can be one tool. They could also tell the LLM to assume the user wants music rather than videos if driving. They either have a really shitty LLM or really shitty tooling around the LLM.
The two greatest problems in handheld assistants is speech recognition and command integration.
Gemini solves neither of those, and I was already complaining about Google’s crappy assistant long before the LLM era lol.
I could be wrong, but why hasn’t someone just bothered gluing openai whisper to something like voice attack from elite dangerous?
I’m not going to embrace the spyware, thanks.
Use android and don’t have any of this enabled. That’s not to say I’m an anti-Ai purist. If I want to do a query I open an app and then close it when I’m done. This work flow just works so much better than having some sort of constant monitoring trying to be available when not needed. From Clippy to Gemini the idea of lurking pro-active Ai assistance has failed. This needs to be a pull function not a push.
I’m mostly an anti-AI purist.
It just gets too much wrong, too often, to really be used with any regularity for me. I do use it for a few technical things, but only if the added time required for validation still nets out well for my own efficiency.
Not sold is putting it very mildly. I found a fix for all of the bullshit though: you go into the default apps area and you choose none for assistant. Before I did that they had sideloaded fucking Gemini onto my phone via Android Auto and when I was trying to navigate somewhere I had to speak to some useless middle manager Gemini guy that didn’t like cursing before he passed it off to the virtual woman to do the actual navigation. Google: bringing the patriarchy to your digital assistants.
Yeah, I switched my launcher to Lawnchair because they put the AI button right where my right thumb would touch the search bar. It seemed like it was also by design. My launcher now looks identical to the stock launcher on the Pixel, except without an AI button.
Removed the app, moving to gOS. Its far too invasive and I am just sick of using google anything.
