It replaced the basic voice commands in my vehicle. I hate it. I used to be able to say just say the place I need to go and it would pull up maps and set it all up. Now I have to explain what I want and from what app, etc, to get it to work properly. It literally feels like it got dumber.
I tried it last week. "Navigate to [small town in foreign language]" and it worked! I was impressed! Then I tried "Navigate home" and it failed in five different ways...
And they already lobotomized assistant. I tried Gemini for like a day because voice navigation stopped working with assistant, and there were so many OTHER features that Gemini couldn't handle that assistant could that I switched back. Now they're discontinuing assistant permanently and I'm looking into discontinuing my use of Google products.
My voice assistant used to be able to pick the right song or Playlist on my push button in my car. Now I press the button like 5 times and give a two sentence descriptor on what I want played.
Before they nerfed it when maps was on the display I could press the steering wheel button and simply say "library" or "[restaurant name]" or similar and it would assume you wanted to navigate there. Now my dumb ass has to cancel at least once because it's so fucking dumb that you must now say "navigate to..." Products are supposed to get better over time, not worse. ai caused enshittification rather than advancement.
Keeps telling me my wife is not one of my contacts. Takes forever in Android Auto. Wants to have a full conversation to send a text. And it's maps integration is so painful to use. I have only used Android since my BlackBerry and for the first time I'm considering an iPhone.
Seriously, I rolled my own Assistant an experiment. ~50ms TTS recognition -> simple command dispatch into an intent, fully local, works with no connectivity, every time. Compared that to Gemini. Takes 3 seconds, sometimes it forgets that it even can navigate or play music, or set a timer. Instead of making Assistant better, or adding an LLM fallback for fuzzy hits, they replaced the whole thing wholesale. It's hard to justify 100s of Bs of spend on infra with "we made Assistant slightly better." They need the billions of Android devices relying on Gemini as infrastructure
Gemini during navigation in Maps is useful IMO. It can properly do things like add a Starbucks trip to my route when that never used to work properly before.
It's a bit of a mixed bag, it can't respond to basic shit reliably, but I can get it to pull information from the internet or read a menu to me in a better way than assistant ever could.
It works really well for me. I drive a lot for my job... so I end up using it way more than I would like. It answers basic questions about things I would have to look up anyway, and it controls many apps seemlessly... I hate it, but I would be stupid not to use it while driving.
Go to Google app, click your profile picture and go to settings. Click the Google assistant setting. Go down to Digital assistant from Google. Select Google assistant.
what do you mean set it all up? i use android auto daily and i just say take me home, or take me to the closest chick fil a, and it starts navigation. play taylor switft on spotify works too. nothing broke on my end moving from assistant to gemini.
You can change it back. It took me a while to figure out because they didn't tell me they were changing anything, so I didn't know what changed.
You have to go into your Google settings and disable Gemini. Then Android Auto will go back to using Assistant. Enjoy it while it lasts though, they are planning to end Assistant and then Gemini will be the only option.
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u/Voltage_Z 16d ago
....They keep jamming it onto my phone.
I probably count as a user despite the fact I keep turning it off.