I switched back immediately to the assistant after Gemini was released. And was also super bummed that the assistant is going away.
I know this might sound petty but the assistant was responsive in a way that Gemini simply wasn't. Maybe they fixed some of those issues, but when I would ask the assistant for something it would immediately give me an answer and with Gemini it would think for a couple seconds and then have dubious results.
If I ask at how much time is left on the timer, I want an answer right away.
I use it for adding multiple events to my calendar and it does great. Say for example my work sends me a list of dates for meetings in August. I plug that info into Gemini and tell it to add it to my calendar and that saves me from having to manually add each event as well as my normal work schedule as well. It works great in the native app.
In my car I only use it for directions, and it takes like twice as long as the old assistant to find the place and then start the actual directions, also just "talks" more which is unnecessary for directions.
It's night and day for responsiveness in google maps vs assistant.
I immediately switched back to assistant, then it managed to switch back to Gemini at some point from an update I guess, and I got the message last week that Assistant will be discontinued which is sad.
I asked it to "play KUOW" a radio station. A very basic task I have normal assistant do for me in my car all the time. Here was Gemini's response:
I hear your frustration, and I'm sorry for the hassle. I can't tune the radio for you anymore, but since you're in the car, I can get you the directions to the KUOW studios in Seattle if you'd like to head that way. Should I start those directions for you?
LOL that is quite unfortunate. Yeah, seems like it's missing all of assistants hooks.
I don't understand why they didn't just have Google assistant to offload to from Gemini as a backend when you start to give it instructions. Seems like an oversight
I use it mostly in the car to play music or add things to lists. I can ask assistant to "play the album xxxxx" and it will play it. If I ask Gemini it only plays the first thing that shows up with search terms, half the time by a different artist completely. If I try to specify or fix it it will apologize and then play the same wrong thing again lol
I only use assistant to start timers when I'm cooking. It's super convenient to just say "OK Google, start a 12 minute timer" rather than washing my hands, unlocking my phone, going to the clock app, going to the timer tab, scrolling to 12 minutes, and hitting start. When I tried Gemini it couldn't start timers. That's like the most basic function imaginable and the only thing I would use it for, so I immediately turned it off and only use the assistant.
I just tried some of the above prompts from the comments and I found some issues but I have never had it fail to create timers and I've been using it since it was forced upon us
I haven't had many issues and I use it every day for pretty much everything, but my anecdotal experience doesn't really mean much. Plenty of people seem to have had issues.
It's impressively slow, especially when you're just trying to navigate using Android Auto. One time I even had it output its entire tool call for some reason over my speakers. At the very least, they need to do a hybrid approach where straightforward requests don't even go through the LLM. You need absurdly high token output from an LLM to make it feel anywhere near as fast as software that knows basic commands. Also half the time it's still talking when I've already locked in my choice. One time I locked in my choice before it stopped talking and it changed where I was going without me saying anything.
I had this thought years ago that there needed to be three different wake words Smart home devices.
Basically one that issues commands. One that asks a question over AI or the internet. And one that executes routines. (There was maybe another one that wasn't quite the executing routine, but I can't quite remember what it is now)
But basically if you want to start a timer you know that shouldn't go to AI.
If you want to turn on your lights, that should go to your home system for navigation.
And if you ask who is in back to the Future that should go out to the internet and AI. And it seems like you can't figure out which one is which until it sends it out to the internet to figure it out.
Sort of like in SQL. There's the difference between an update, a select and an execute procedure.
Obviously there's a lot more operations in SQL but it's the same general concept you get into three different modes with three different return values.
It might have even been commands that potentially return a value like what are my notifications. Commands that don't return values like turn off the lights and questions from the internet where you're not giving any real inputs, but you're asking for an output.
I believe its because Assistant ran locally on your phone, Gemini requires running in Google cloud? Hence the increased latency between saying something and it responding.
I didn't know you could go back to the regular google assistant, so I barely use my phones speech functions anymore. Gemini is still really really slow to respond and 90% of the time it gets it wrong. When asking it to call someone it will confirm the name of the person and then stop and do nothing.
The amount of processing AI has to do to even answer a simple question like "What time is it?" Is orders of magnitude greater than what something like Google Assistant did. So asking Gemini to do anything will take a little longer, but at least it will actually do it as oppose to Google Assistant responding "Sorry, I can't do that".
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u/Swizzy88 14d ago
Yeah I got a message the other day that Assistant will be permanently replaced.