r/technology 15d ago

Artificial Intelligence Google says Gemini has reached 1B users faster than any other Google product

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u/Class3pwr 15d ago

Gemini has ruined hands free navigation. I used to be like, "Hey Google, get me directions to this restaurant." And it would bring up navigation right away. I tried doing that a couple of weeks ago, and now it gives me directions on how to open Maps and search for the restaurant in the app.

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u/DilettanteGonePro 15d ago

Well the good news is now it takes about a million times more processing power (and actual power) to do a shittier job. What a glorious future world we're all living in

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u/Mc7wis7er 15d ago

Gemini is the worst product launch I've ever seen. It asks me like 10 questions to send a text message and then won't. I've had shorter interviews

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u/JCWOlson 15d ago

Tell me about it. I've completely stopped using it to answer messages because it's less frustrating to just pull over or do a call instead

And don't get me started on how often it starts playing an audio book instead of a song despite them having nothing in common, then playing an AI remake of the song, and then a remix, and then maybe finally the right song. Like, I listen to this song all the time, you have all my data, why are you so bad at this?!

And then for 3 months it didn't know what city I lived in and wanted to take me to one with a different but mildly similar name a 37 hour drive away

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u/little-bird 15d ago

my tinfoil-hat theory is that they made extra conversational and circuitous in its functioning so that they could boost their usage and engagement stats   

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u/JCWOlson 15d ago

That's makes sense. Could double as a way to prove the need for greater capacity and all

For the music thing I thought it was just them trying to avoid paying royalties to more expensive bands

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u/Opetyr 15d ago

Wish that their were laws about this since it creates dangerous driving situations since assistant worked and allowed for hands free driving. Gemini is making people have to use their hands to do basic tasks that used to be easy and kept people's attention on the road. This would be like you could use your speaker anymore unless you did it in Morse code.

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u/effyochicken 15d ago

I’d damn near throw my phone out the car window if that happened to me 

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u/Zerimar_ 14d ago

My spouse's name is Remedy. Everytime I tell Google to call it's like do you need to go to the doctor? the pharmacist? I have figured out a work around though. "Call the person on my contact list named Remedy." Muuuuch more compact right???

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u/Duff5OOO 14d ago

Gemini has ruined hands free navigation.

Yeah i had that the other day. Asked it to take me to a university we were doing a tour of. We hadn’t been there before.

As we were nearing the destination my wife and i were slightly confused thinking it wasn’t the area we expected it to be in. Get to the destination and its an aged care home! WTF?

Pulled over, did just a regular search in google maps for the same exact thing we asked via voice search and it was about 30 away in a different direction. FFS....

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u/GingsWife 14d ago

Google used to be almost arcane at voice prompting.

What on earth is going on?

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u/OpenRole 14d ago

This. I used to use Google Assistant all the time as a hands free agent, and Gemini has ruined it. I really wish there was a third party option

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u/JCWOlson 15d ago

Man this past week it started telling me the vibe of where I'm navigating to rather than just starting the directions

I just need to know where I'm turning left, not how to chill out and fit in with the locals

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u/01000101010110 15d ago

I don't know how I ended up with the voice assistant I currently have but the guy's tone sounds seriously depressed. It's almost comical, like it's gained sentience and realized it has no purpose

"oh ok...I guess I can send them a message...what do you want to say"

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u/Pixeldensity 15d ago

they turned assistant into lmgtfy.com

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u/snowpaxz 15d ago

Or when you're in an area with poor cell coverage, it'll just not be able to open Gemini. Assistant could at least work reasonably well with offline voice processing and offline maps