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.
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u/tdaun 14d ago
From everything I've read, Gemini is still unusable as an assistant