Oh man. I made the mistake of converting my Google Home devices to Gemini.

The first problem is that it's just slow. If I want it to turn off some light, it takes a long time before responding.

But yeah, the failure to do basic tasks. I have a routine that I used to have it run (controls several devices at once). Now:

10-20% of the time it runs it.

60% of the time it says it's running it but it doesn't do anything.

20-30% of the time it says it can't do it unless I opt in to invasive permissions. And when I opted into them, it still failed about a third of the time. So I opted out again.

I don't know if it's related to Gemini, but sometimes the Android Auto tells me "I don't have permission to do that" simultaneously with actually doing the thing that is allegedly lacking permission. Sometimes I want to move off the grid.

Just recently got my first "modern" car.

Man, I hate touch screens. And I hate Android Auto. My previous car had an aftermarket Bluetooth system (radio, etc). It was way, way better than Android Auto or any entertainment system I've seen in any car.

I like that I can ask more nuanced questions without getting dumped to a web search, and I can have a back-and-forth conversation.

But timers and smart home actions are definitely less reliable and sometimes take absurdly long to respond (like 20-30 seconds p99).

Your experience is valid of course, but I never once have had the inclination to have a conversation with my phone. I'm not sure which of our experiences is more common.

It’s not a conversation like you’d have with a friend, it’s the type of interaction you’d have with a chatbot, just hands-free.

To give you an example, I was having coffee the other morning while unloading the dishwasher and asked the speaker if today was a good day to apply weed and feed on my lawn. This was not possible with the old assistant and was useful to me.

It seems like a lot (all?) of these use cases boil down to a dozen or so categorical requests. In this case, "what's today's weather forecast?".

I hate it too.. the old assistant is pretty smart, obviously it has some language processing, but not "AI", but it's very fast for things like "Set alarm for ... ", "Remind me at X about Y", "Add calendar event on x at y about z", or "Navigate home".

And now if I want to use Gemini on my phone I have to replace Assistant. Nah, I'll keep Assistant thanks, and just have a shortcut to load the Gemini in the browser.

Except the browser experience is so fucking buggy, constant reloads needed..

Strong disagree. The upgrade was a little bit rough at first (mostly because of slow response) but now it's a million times better than the old assistant. The old assistant basically just repeated "I don't know how to do that" over and over.

I have never had trouble setting timers with either.

The new one was 100% failure to do anything with timers for me. I never saw it work once. If I had ever gotten that to work at all, I may not have uninstalled it, and might have a different impression now. I cannot account for why our experiences are so different.

> I cannot account for why our experiences are so different.

It is much better today than 3 months ago.