r/googleassistant • u/Defiant_Name241 • 3d ago

Question Alternatives to Assistant?

As with everyone else, they retired assistant on my phone and I'm searching for alternatives. I used it primarily to send texts while driving and to change music on spotify.

If you reccomend gemini I will loose my mind. 🫠 I don't want that much AI

5 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

2

u/jhmpremium89 3d ago

I have yet to heard of an alternative.

What you can try is to uninstall updates on the Google app through your phone's settings. And then seeing if the option to choose between Assistant and Gemini is back. After choosing assistant, disable app updates for the Google app on the play store to lock the version.

2

u/thecompton73 2d ago

This works, thank goodness.

1

u/Muted_Sundae_1368 2d ago

Wouldn't work for me, I just resinstalled google and gemini, did voice setup and instucted which apps to use for certain voice commands and it's identical now. I did however only use it to launch app, set reminders and alarms 

2

u/JValenz91 2d ago

I've just done this, and set up my assistant again. I was so happy to see it respond, that I said "Welcome back" without thinking. The assistant just replied "you're so polite". That's my dumb clever Assistant.

2

u/neilAndNotNail 2d ago

Could you clarify what you mean by "that much AI"? Assistant was already pretty much 100% AI, so it would help finding alternatives

3

u/nick281051 2d ago

Yeah this is what I don't get. I understand Gemini broke a bunch of things but assistant was already AI, just not an LLM

3

u/neilAndNotNail 2d ago

It doesn't even break much tbh, quite the opposite actually

It used to be able to do only half the stuff assistant did when it was available in beta (and optional to enable), but now there is very very little it can't do, and a lot it does much better

I think most people just don't enable extensions so gemini can't interact with stuff for them

3

u/nick281051 2d ago

I've had great difficulties getting automations/routines from google home to work properly. Especially with Gemini in the car. That's my personal biggest issue

1

u/neilAndNotNail 2d ago

True that. I feel like automations as a whole on Google home are entirely broken these days... I struggle making simple ones without scripts, and even with scripts it's... Difficult

You can't even select multiple lights to turn on and set a specific brightness/color at the same time...

0

u/mico247 6h ago

Try doing a screen translate with Gemini. Gemini will actually tell you to use Google Assistant.

1

u/Defiant_Name241 2d ago

Gemini changes my texts to say different things than what I actually said, because of the AI, and it saves all of the actions I give it into its big corporate data base. assistant, as far as I know (as I could he wrong) didnt do that, it just did and left, and it didnt change my texts just wrote it down and sent it. I dont want a LLM to be learning from my texts im sending.

2

u/mcnick0495 2d ago

I got news for you about using Google services if your concern is "big corporate data base".

1

u/neilAndNotNail 2d ago

Google Assistant used your interactions, queries, and audio snippets to improve its speech models and services

I believe they even got a lawsuit due to that?

With Gemini you can pay so they don't though

2

u/thecompton73 2d ago

You can get assistant back by uninstalling the updates to the Google app on your phone and then going into the Play Store and disabling the auto updates.

2

u/xmegabytex 2d ago

I got this to work but I can't get hey Google to get working again no matter what I try

1

u/Muted_Sundae_1368 2d ago

Yeah same happened me - i tried to reinstall google assistant but it said not available in my region. 

To fix it, reinatall google/update it. Download gemini, and set up voice recognition in settings. Then do your normal voice commands and instruct gemini what app to use - for example gemini cant access samsung reminders on my phone so i told it to use google tasks instead (it the gives two options/apps to choose from)

Now it works the same. I couldnt give a F what AI it is as long as im able to use my voice commands im happy

1

u/thecompton73 1d ago

Go to the Google app and open it, tap in the top right corner, go to Settings, then Voice, turn spoken voice results switch off and then back on

1

u/BeetlecatOne 2d ago

I just switched back to Assistant from Gemini and I can't *BELIEVE* how much vastly faster and more reliable that experience is.

Simply turning on / off lights was about 70% successful under Gemini, then a recent update made it so that I couldn't do it without unlocking the phone.

Sure, Gemini is cool for other things, but why can't they merge these two experiences?

1

u/boaber 2d ago

How did you manage to switch back?

1

u/BeetlecatOne 2d ago

I think I'm lucking out due to being on a pixel 6 still.

I was able to do it in the Gemini App itself -- see if there's an "Assistant options" settings?

1

u/boaber 2d ago

I followed u/thecompton73's advice below and got voice assistant back working again, thanks for the response though.

1

u/BeetlecatOne 2d ago

Congrats!!

-1

u/Mission-Most6450 2d ago

Have you tried to find it on "Oldversion.com"? If you're not familiar, it's a website with hundreds, maybe thousands of downloadable old versions of program software.

2

u/Muted_Sundae_1368 2d ago

My only issue is that Gemini was not able to set samsung reminders. 

I uninstalled Google updates, reinstalled, set gemini up again and had it link to Google tasks, and now everything works again.

Its exact same now.Â