Eh, I use Gemini to project manage my little herb garden. Low stakes, well trodden ground. It was the kind of thing I knew LLMs could handle for stuff I do know about, so I’m trusting it for something I don’t know about.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if my herbs live or die, I know I’ll kill them on my own though. Gardening isn’t a skill I want to actively acquire, I just want the herbs. It (the garden) is doing fine. I had some yellow leaves, the bot said to top dress it, I did, no more yellow leaves. So far so good.
Anything beyond the well trodden LLMs are shit at though. I tried to use it to find a specific motorcycle part, discontinued by the manufacturer: it couldn’t. When I wanted it to shop for me, it failed. It seems to be doing well managing this non-commercial project for me.
gee, i wonder why…
Gemini is fucking garbage, it’s useless as an assistant and Google destroyed Assistant which could do genuinely helpful things like navigate hands free, set timers reliably and without Internet connections, set calendar reminders, etc.
Try to use voice commands to navigate now?
Gemini tells you to use the Maps app.
Fuck you Gemini, that’s not helpful at all.
Get your shit together Google.
The funny thing is there’s no reason for it to be so shitty just because they use Gemini for it. LLMs can use tools if given access. There’s no reason they can’t give it a tool to use intents to launch activities. I can run their own open weight Gemma model in llama.cpp and I’m pretty sure it can call tools.
Lately I feel like Google or Microsoft could pay me like a million a year and I could single-handedly fix their most broken products and the AI doesn’t even have to go. Teams? Don’t care how much tracking they put in it, it can be made more performant and the UI can be made usable. Gemini? Could legitimately be fixed to do everything the old Google assistant did and more. Outlook though? Yeah that one has to go. No saving it anymore.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. AI can eat the entirety of my arse.
The two greatest problems in handheld assistants is speech recognition and command integration.
Gemini solves neither of those, and I was already complaining about Google’s crappy assistant long before the LLM era lol.
I could be wrong, but why hasn’t someone just bothered gluing openai whisper to something like voice attack from elite dangerous?
Gemini has now replaced the default “dumb” assistant in android auto. On my drive home from picking my daughter up from preschool, she wanted to listen to Golden from KPOP Demon Hunters. Gemini gave me several sentences about how much it liked the song, then asked if I needed anything else. Then it failed to actually start the song playing. Half of the time it assumes I’m asking it to play a video on YouTube and says it can’t do that while driving, so I have to specify to play using my music app.
And the irony is that it’s not even because LLMs can’t be used that way. LLMs can be given access to tools they can use and launching YouTube music can be one tool. They could also tell the LLM to assume the user wants music rather than videos if driving. They either have a really shitty LLM or really shitty tooling around the LLM.
Use android and don’t have any of this enabled. That’s not to say I’m an anti-Ai purist. If I want to do a query I open an app and then close it when I’m done. This work flow just works so much better than having some sort of constant monitoring trying to be available when not needed. From Clippy to Gemini the idea of lurking pro-active Ai assistance has failed. This needs to be a pull function not a push.
I’m mostly an anti-AI purist.
It just gets too much wrong, too often, to really be used with any regularity for me. I do use it for a few technical things, but only if the added time required for validation still nets out well for my own efficiency.
Removed the app, moving to gOS. Its far too invasive and I am just sick of using google anything.
Well yeah my limited experience is an android auto update replaced Assistant with Gemini, and now it can’t do anything new, only the same things much slower and with occasional really weird results. Totally worth all the lay offs and resources hogging.
Yes it is much much slower. Ask to navigate it says checking maps or something for a while then does it. Old way it just happened.
To save you all some time, this is the poll.
“Aren’t sold yet” from the title seems to imply the yellow section, not the red. Almost as if it’s going to be shoved down our throat no matter how we feel about it. Not that there’s been any doubt about that, but the article title is certainly telling about the bias of this article…
“Aren’t sold” would be the yellow plus the red. It doesn’t imply that they are still open to being sold on it.
It certainly implies that they can be sold. That they’re a commodity to be bartered and not individuals with their own minds. That their decision can be bought and sold rather than convinced.
i dont want to use AI at all, anywhere, lol. google/samsung tried to force bixby down our throats and now they’re doing the same with Gemini. i dont want any part of it!!!
Ok Grandpa.
You’d think someone as artistic as you would understand how insane it is to blindly accept AI.
Ok Claude.
Wild that people just casually admit to outsourcing their thinking to a machine. I’d never willing post something that embarrassing. Butlerian Jihad Now.
I’m not going to lie I use AI. It is better then search for looming things up. And I have vibe coded a few niche things for myself.
Go back to candles and charcoal pencil on tree bark then. Take it all the way, you are against all forms of technological improvement while communicating online. Your hypocrisy is leaking.
Nah you just have innovation bias. Newer does not automatically mean better. That’s a wild take in 2026 since all of these companies have been marching towards enshitification for a decade.
Plenty of research showing that use of AI is just offloading your cognitive function. We know enough about neuroplasticity to clearly see this will impair those who use it for everything. It’s important to be challenged sometimes, the illusion of intelligence does nothing for us.
Your brain is leaking
That implies there’s something to leak.
I’d take a semi-aware grandpa any time over a completely tech-oblivious, doom-scrolling facebook-and-X-twat 😁
Go do some vibe coding ya neckbeard.
I prefer paying people to do that, but thanks.
So just a hypocrite then.
So just a troll then.
Trolls gonna troll. This here is what we call a false equivalency. Paying to have a person use their skills to complete a complex technical task with liability is far different from using an environment destroying, unreliable and insecure technology that carries no liability to do a worse job. One funds a person that will circulate that income, the other goes to a mega Corp where a billionaire will sleep on that money like an IRL Smaug.
You’re cute. Are you available as a plushie?
Yes
Brother, its okay not to be okay. Theres help for everyone out there.
Spotted the AI loving troglodyte
Elon? where?
Actually the bandwagon shifted and it’s you on the wrong side LMAO fucking lemmings.
You’re the lemming though. You’re the one who jumped on the bandwagon.
You fucking wish, loser
*grandma, you ugly bitch :)
. The biggest of them involves how Gemini could bear the load of mundane or mindless tasks you do on your phone or other Android devices.
Like…what?
Exactly, we don’t need it for anything. I have zero tasks that I need automation for on my phone. In fact, I have typically zero tasks that I need to do on my phone at all.
You know what tasks I actually NEED to do? I need to mow my back yard, and I need to install gutters on my house. AI is not going to help any of that, so it’s useless for my needs. Meanwhile, it is wasting a fortune in energy and an environmental crisis worth of water.
Paying for parking in my city requires a phone.
You either have to use the QR code, a text message, or call a line with an auto-attendant. There is no physical kiosk on the street to use.
“Need” really imposes some incredibly urgent something.
I actually do love automation, but why use ai for that? Macrodroid, tasker, automate… But hey, they NEED us to need it.
But AI could totally tell you the top rated lawn mowers in stock in your area based on fake bought and paid for reviews to optimize your efficiency at mowing your lawn and increasing the capitalist profit margins of local stores that pay Google for increased foot traffic to their stores.
Set a 5 minute timer
That’s really it.
Wow. Is this possible nowadays? What a time to be alive. But can it be also a 10m timer? What about 1m? I’m skeptical…
It depends. 10 is okay. 15 is usually fine.
14 minutes has a 50/50 chance of being 40 minutes.
See? I knew it was half-assed. But maybe i can download an extra 14-min-timer-app?
Like stuff. Don’t worry about it. AI will take care of everything. Now shut up and let us announce 20 more datacenters in peace.
Stuff you say? That’s the thing I like most! I’m so exited. We need more data centers!
Browsing Lemmy 😁
So it could do that for me? That’d be awesome, wouldn’t even need my phone for that anymore!
“Gemini, do everything I would’ve done on this phone today, so I can do something else, like plowing your mom or do my taxes”.
I love the future!
Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!
My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!
Lol. It sure will change all our lifes. Maybe just not the way we expect it…
Gemini is garbage, it’s always wrong.
Does anyone else notice AI just being referred to as “intelligence” in the media a lot now? Seems very sudden and very sus.
My guess is that’s apples fault. “Apple intelligence”
It’s cool how they’ve broken assistant so badly that commands like “Call Mom” and “Set a timer for 20 minutes” no longer work for me the majority of the time.
“Set an alarm” is similarly totally fucked now. I used to use the Google assistant for simple stuff like that, but now it’s way easier to just open the clock app and set the reminder myself. Then they added a widget/shortcut to identify the song playing in the room, and now I don’t need the assistant at all.
That is the worst about it. They have made it worse. Sure it might be able to “do more” but I don’t want the more I want it to be able to navigate to places by voice send a text and call people. Oh my God is calling people so bad. They are not in your contacts because it thinks I said something different.
It’s awesome that one of the best features of my TV, “Find my remote” has been completely broken. Paid extra for the fancy Bluetooth remote and everything, and now it’s completely worthless. Every time I ask, I get “Sorry, I’m not set up to do that” despite it being something that I’ve been doing the past 5 years without issue
I tried to set a reminder yesterday and is proceeded to search Google for “set a reminder for 9pm”. AI is making my phone less useful and it’s infuriating. Even worse, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I guess it depends on geminis mood?
If your assistant is alexa, you can disable alexa plus and it’ll go back to the original non-LLM backend.
I only use amazon products when I have no other options. I use google assistant, which was the only voice assistant I ever felt was even vaguely competent.
It used to be able to do some very useful stuff, like setting location-based reminders, but they’ve slowly been pulling functionality out and I’m sure I won’t have an option between it and gemini for much longer.
I used to use Google Home speaker for a grocery list.
It’s handy but like is that the reason I have an always listening device in my home? Is that all it can do?? That was before they removed features from the list commands. Jesus wept, good riddance
