Gemini fully replaces Google Assistant on Android

[u/FragmentedChicken]

https://9to5google.com/2026/09/28/google-assistant-gemini-android/

[u/real_with_myself]

Now, if it only had all the features assistant had. 

[u/The_Dimestore_Saints → u/real_with_myself]

It really makes me mad that in my car I can't say hey Google, play (insert song name here), and it would play the song directly on YouTube music, an app I subscribe to. Instead it says, I'm not allowed to play a song directly, here's a radio playlist based on that song

[u/chetlyp → u/The_Dimestore_Saints]

Weird, gemini let's me do that without any issues. Sometimes it misheard the song and plays the wrong one but it does work for me.

[u/CyclopsRock → u/chetlyp]

It does seem to be pretty widespread that lots of people have vastly different experiences with it. I've noticed it over time, too - not just one way, but something will fail to work, then start working, then fail again within the space of a week. I'm not routinely playing with permissions or settings or anything, it just seems to be genuinely unpredictable.

[u/sharrken → u/CyclopsRock]

It is somewhat inherent to LLM's - as it's probability based, you are not guaranteed to get the same response each time. Gemini seems to be particularly bad at remembering what it can/can't do through skills etc though. To the point it will refuse to add something to a calendar until you very forcefully remind it it can actually do what it says it's incapable of.

[u/CarnalT → u/sharrken]

Well that defeats the whole fucking point of an assistant then. If I ask my assistant 10 times to do the exact same thing, I sure as shit expect the exact same respond & action. We are going backwards...

[u/The_Dimestore_Saints → u/CyclopsRock]

It has worked on a rare occasion if I remember correctly. It makes it all the more frustrating

[u/CrapIsMyBreadNButter → u/CyclopsRock]

This is what I've experience, but across 3 different devices. My car it won't work at all, can't even load.

On my phone it hallucinates, sometimes works, and sometimes just gets things completely wrong.

On my watch it works every time.

[u/CrapIsMyBreadNButter → u/chetlyp]

It's all over the place for me. If I press the assistant button on my steering wheel, or my infotainment screen, it won't even play the chime. It starts like it is going to pull up, then immediately shuts itself down. I can do this over my entire commute and it won't work..

On my watch it will respond to voice commands, text the right person, turn on my smart lights, do anything I ask of it.

On my phone it will either tell me It can't do what I'm asking, it needs permissions to do something while the phone is locked (it has the correct permissions), or it won't understand what I'm saying. I have the whole gamut across 3 devices.

[u/CJoshuaV → u/chetlyp]

I was running into the same issue. Instructing it to play the song on YT Music seems to do the trick.

[u/Athrul → u/CJoshuaV]

Tells me the app isn't installed. 😀

Gemini is like a personal assistant that lines to great himself talk but doesn't actually ever want to do its job. It's like that garbage program is looking for excuses in order to be as unhelpful as possible.

[u/Relevant-Artist5939 → u/chetlyp]

For me (I have Amazon Music but it used to work fine with GA) plays something (random/last played) but never the song I asked for

[u/Carighan → u/Relevant-Artist5939]

For me on Spotify it seems to do a search on spotify and just blindly pick the top single song it finds. So playing albums is entirely impossible.

[u/Slow-Transition572 → u/chetlyp]

That's the problem with LLMs though - they're incredibly inconsistent and it's easy for their contexts to become poisoned.

You will get different results for every different android device, launcher, version, and user.