Introduction
Why does Google insist on making it’s assistant situation so bad?
In theory, assistant should be the best it’s ever been. It’s better at “understanding” what I ask for, and yet it less capable than ever to do so.
This post is a rant about my experience using modern assistants on Android, and why, while I used to use these features actively in the mid-to-late-2010s, I now don’t even bother with them.
The task
Back in the late 2010s, I used to be able to hold the home button and ask the Google Assistant to create an event based on this email. It would grab the context from my screen, and do exactly that. This has been impossible, as far as I can tell, to do for years now.
Trying to find the “right” assistant
At some point, my phone stopped responding to “OK Google”. I still don’t know why it won’t work.
Holding down the Home bar (the home button went the way of the dodo) brings up an assistant-style UI, but it’s dumb as bricks and only Googles the web. Useless.
So, I installed Gemini. I asked it to perform a basic task. It responded “in live mode, I cannot do that”. Asking it how I can get it to create me a calendar event, it could not answer the question. Saying instead to open my calendar app and create a new event. I know how to use a calendar. I want it to justify its existence by providing more value than a Google search. It was ultimately unable to answer the question.
Searching the internet, apparently both of the ways I had been using assistant features were the wrong way to do it. You have to hold down the power button, that’s how to launch the proper one. My internal response was:
No, that’s for the power menu. I don’t want to dedicate it to Assistant.
Well, apparently, that’s the only way to do it now, so there I go sacrificing another convenience turning it on.
Pulling teeth with Gemini
So I ask this power-menu-version of Gemini to do the same simple task. I tried 4 separate times.
First, it created a random event “Meeting with a client” on a completely different day (what?).
Second time it just crashed with an error.
The third time, it asked me which email to use, giving me a list, but that list did not contain the email I was interested in. I asked it to find the Royal Mail one. No success.
So, quite clearly, it wasn’t using screen content.
I rephrased the question: “Please create an event from the content on my screen”. It replied “Sure, when’s this for?”
I shouldn’t have to tell you. That’s the point. It’s right there.
Conclusion
There are too many damn assistant versions, and they are all bad. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to also have Bixby in the mix as a Samsung user. (Feel free to let me know below.)
It seems like none of them are able to pull context from what you are doing anymore, and you’ll spend more time fiddling and googling how to make them work than it would take for you to do the task yourself.
In some ways, assistants have gotten worst than almost 10 years ago, despite billions in investments.
As a little bonus, the internet is filled with AI slop that makes finding out real facts, real studies from real people harder than ever.
I write this all mostly to blow off steam, as this stuff has been frustrating me for years now. Let me know what your experience has been like below, I could use some camaraderie.
because it said “these are just a few examples” and it said nothing of value so far, I wanted more:
I was baffled that it had no contextual clues about what I said, mind that the non-AI Assistant was usually good at this. And once again, unnecessarily verbose answer, and treating my question as a tech support problem:
Here it is telling me that I should provide context each time like a fucking idiot because that’s how intelligence works, right?
Then I pointed out this is objectively worse than Assistant and it replied with a fucking essay. Please don’t read this.
I’ll just provide TLDR- both have different strengths. Google Assistant is better at things that are useful and Gemini is better at things that don’t fucking matter at all:
I asked a couple more questions about Assistant’s advantages over Gemini. It barely understood but essentially reiterated that Assistant was just better at things that are useful. So I asked more hoping for more complex things AI could do:
The answer is no, and instead it wrote me another fucking essay that I’ll skip here, about different apps I could use for automation like IFTTT. Because that’s what I want an assistant for, to tell me go do things myself.
I still wanted to see if I could make use of things so I kept it for a while. It answered some simple questions about synonyms and meanings of words. I like this one in particular:
anyway this is basically the end of the introductory period. I’ll continue with a reply for the actual meat.
Here’s Gemini not knowing what the fuck it even is and what it can do:
Wrong on two levels: It is supposed to be a voice assistant and yes you can choose voices for it.
Failing to understand basic sentences:
I think I may have typed it just so it could understand but no help, “try voice”:
So I try voice and it fails to understand again:
Failing to parse basic syntax:
I try to ask again:
It replies in that language that of course it can! Soooo next prompt:
Failing to understand again… How does “dictate” sound like “succeed”:
Try again, it’s finally ready:
But it keeps trying to interpret what I say in English right after, and a real life Who’s on First routine ensues:
Ok… Can you interpret anything on my screen? You know Google Assistant did it for a while.
I try the “live” conversation. Which is supposed to help continue so you don’t keep repeatingly initiate prompts. Cool, but it literally cannot do anything during this mode:
still going with Live, another Who’s on First routine ensues as it thinks I’m referring to the timer I set way before:
apparently the timer doesn’t even work, still 3:59 left? maybe it was cached, so I ask again to confirm:
oh never mind. it went up.
finally a while later I encountered some sort of error message that mentioned Siri. I wish I would have screenshot it at the time but I couldn’t think of it. But I either asked whether it used Siri’s code or just why it mentioned Siri at all… something like that. I can’t tell you exactly because it’s not showing up in my history:
but I think it denied having any connection to Siri because I apparently accused it of lying. of course it can’t even parse the word “Siri’s” from context:
Sometime later I ask for default Microsoft fonts:
I promise you that this is not my accent or anything. I’ve been devouring English since I was a little kid, native English speakers are usually surprised I’m not a native speaker. It’s just so much worse at understanding words, by its own admission (one of the advantages it listed for Assistant over Gemini was voice recognition, though it claimed it was a slight advantage)
I try to correct it and say I meant “Microsoft fonts”, it interprets it—hilariously—much much worse:
I try to spell the word “font” and hope it will get it but while the spelling works, it somehow interprets “Microsoft” as “humps”???
Finally my last interaction. Basic prompt, I ask the value of $20 in my own currency. This prompt works with Assistant all the time, it knows where I am and what currency I use so this should be easy, right?
I am frustrated and say how it can’t understand what I meant. IT MISINTERPRETS THE CURRENCY I MEANT AND WAS STILL NOT HELPFUL EVEN IF THE INTERPRETATION WAS CORRECT:
lastly another unhelpful response with a fucking essay just to go back:
I manually switched back and I can at least do basic shit with Assistant.
Read through it. It’s surprising (not really) that AI that’s connected to the internet is as helpful if not less as open source AI trained on barely any data.
Also I love how techbros fucked up the name of AI giving it to algorithm and LLMs predicting words, like how “hover boards” don’t hover. When we actually get both of them, we’ll be disappointed.
Hope your assistant works at least like it used to.
Thank you. It does, at least as it did before Gemini. I use it mainly to set up an alarm or timer, easy questions like basic math, unit and currency conversion. For those it’s good. I don’t trust it with reminders. Some useful things it had before were removed years ago, like location based reminders and screen as an input. Still good for very quick questions like I listed so I don’t need to pick up my phone to do them. Sometimes I ask the time, that works too, thankfully. I’m glad that my non-intelligent assistant can do things a calculator, clock and calendar can do. Meanwhile AI is having trouble with all of it.