This means:
- Downloading or updating the Assistant app now gives you Gemini instead.
- You can switch back to Assistant in the Gemini app settings.
- This might be Google’s first step towards replacing Assistant completely with Gemini.
- Some users are unaware of the switch and see two Gemini apps on their phones.
Overall, this may suggest Google is phasing out Assistant and transitioning users to the newer Gemini AI technology.
Simple timers, controlling the lights, background music, reminders, and occasionally thing like “how many tablespoons in a pint”.
I don’t ask it for the weather because I don’t want a 30 second lecture on the weather, and it won’t give me “cold now, hot later, might rain between”.
Given that Gemini seem to be unable to give short answers, and it can’t control stuff, it’s missing most of what I require.
Odd I seem to be able to control all my IOT devices no problem so far from Gemini with voice commands over the phone. This way included all smart switches and lights, thermostats and so on.
It seems to function a little quicker in response with the voice commands IMO.
Oh interesting. I’ll have to check it out again. When I first tried it I asked it to turn off the lights and it said it couldn’t interact with the outside world, a d some searching said they hadn’t implemented that yet, so away it went.
I played with it some more, and it seems like it’s just flaky. I could ask it to turn on the living room lights, and it would, but asking it to turn them off got it to inform me that it can’t interact with the outside world.
So it’s not as bad as it first told me, but it’s still not feature parity, and I’m unlikely to use it if it’s not reliable.
Interesting, that somewhat sounds like the pain I had with the og google assistant where I asked it to turn something on and it would just proceed to either turn it off or tell me something different entirely. Though that only started happening to me more over the end of last year where I guess google was just trying to kill it.
For Gemini I installed the standalone app that’s independent of the Google assistant branded app (Gemini was/is still not available inside the assistant app here).
I have been having more success with it where I can ask it longer commands, such as “turn off kitchen lights with hallway lights, and turn on living room lights with the living room shield”.
This kind of command would pretty much end with a “I do not understand” on og google assistant even with a turn of two lights command.
Home control is pretty much the only thing I use Gemini/Google Assistant for. I have been slowly trying to make the switch to a fully local voice with Home Assistant.
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It will give concise explanations like that, but say I want to know the weather 71 miles away at the place where my husband works? Or even 20 miles away where I work. I have to ask it to tell me the weather where I am, tell me the weather in “windhaven”, tell me the weather in "Waterdeep"etc. Or I can just pull up Home Assistant and see a card with that information (which used to work on Google Assistant Smart Displays, but doesn’t work on their current pixel tablet). And I even have a routine set up for this, and now I get a bunch of error messages on my phone and so on. So they broke a lot of things that used to work in Google Assistant, and now Gemini can’t even do those things at all.