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.
It’s default? When I downloaded it, I had to manually choose Gemini to be the default. It wasn’t set like that for me.
And I still try to figure out how to enable it. I just want to try it out so I can decide whether I like it or not, but so far it hasn’t shown up for me…
On my samsung N20U when I use assistant for the past week it will sometimes pop up on screen asking if I’d like to try swapping to gemini. It only stays up a few seconds before going away.
It’s not only the default: you can choose to use the old assistant on Gemini’s config, but the next time you open Gemini it’s as if you just installed it and it sets itself as the default again.
Weird, maybe the Pixel build is slightly different, because that’s not happening on mine and I believe I’ve already got the latest updates for it.
It didn’t happen on mine either. It’s just not true. Samsung S24 Ultra.
Your device is not your device. Google’s device, google’s rules!
Nobody’s violating your rights by publishing an update to the software they provide. If you don’t like it android gives you an option to freeze apps at a particular version. You can let go of your pearls now.
Is this gonna be one of those tech bandwagon things that Google fails at so consistently? You know, like Google phones, Google Plus, Google Pay, Google Stadia, Google Your Poodle, etc.
Google phones are some of the most popular in the marketplace (and their os is the most popular in the world) and Google pay works absolutely fine - I use it everyday, albeit with the new name of wallet.
Google pay and google phones are failures?
Both are THE standard for their respective industries, what you on about?
9 out of 10 veterinarians recommend that you do not Google your poodle.
I thought they just shut down Google Pay yesterday?
I still pay with Google pay on my phone for contactless, did it literally just now. I think they just rebranded instead. Google Wallet I think it is now
No they didn’t. It’s just rebranded again.
Google wallet became android pay which became Google pay which became Google wallet.
iPhones define the smartphone market, but Google makes a solid runner up
You know that android is more popular than iphones pretty much everywhere apart from the US right?
Android? I think I’ve heard of it. Bunch of iPhone clones of widely varying quality. I’ve owned several of both over the years (including both original models), worked for manufacturers of both, developed software for both… the design of the modern smartphone is based on the iPhone, which continues to be most of the best-selling smartphone models in the world. It’s great that there are options in the market, I love that. The iPhone still defines the market.
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Literally the design and user experience is based on the iPhone. People here are revisionists or just jerks.
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Haha, Google. I already type my dumb questions at DuckDuckGo
Srsly… Gemini is pretty cool tho. When I want an AI at least. (Rarely)
The AI part runs in the cloud or on the phone?
Cloud. LLMs aren’t there where they can be run on phones at conversational speed yet.
They absolutely are if you run something like open chat 1.5B, they just want to lock people into their ecosystem.
I guess you can scale it down enough. But if it’s worse than chatgpt 3.5 people will call it terrible and that’s not really what they want right now
It would still be better than the default Google assistant
It’s about the training and tuning. If a model is very good at the few dozen things that I’m likely to want my phone to do, and able to recognize when it should ask a remote, larger model for help, that’s pretty excellent and could conceivably fit on a phone. Even better if the system uses my usage data to train the model to be better for me. For example: I ask it to build me a playlist a few times, but never ask it for recipes. Eventually this usage data retrains to better handle playlist building (probably using a RAG because of how specific the data is) and drops all the training needed for making recipes, which it can always call up the chain for.
Weird I have an option to run on the phone. It says it’s more limited but it’s still an option. Samsung S24 Ultra
Do people use Assistant for more than just reminders, weather, and directions? Lol Just curious because that’s all I use it for.
You use the assistant?
I’ve only ever activated it by accident (I think it’s double-click the power button on my phone). Never actually used the thing.
One of the first things I disabled was the assistant.
“set a timer for X minutes” And “set an alarm for X AM” are super helpful
Don’t forget the “named tea” at the end
Tap tap tap, done.
3 taps to set an arbitrary timer or alarm? No chance.
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or, continue making coffee while asking it to remind you to buy milk instead of either stopping to tap or completely forgetting which are the only possible outcomes
And ask it a second time because it didn’t understand you.
Well, i guess it depends on your type if it’s for you.
I’ve tried one extra layer of complexity - “Remind me to water the plants when I get home” or something like that. It has no idea what I’m asking it to do despite knowing the “remind me” phrase and knowing where my home is.
It used to work years ago. It’s not a technology problem. They changed their policy around location based reminders. One of the reasons I’m degoogling. I got rid of apple products too when they got rid of Google maps in favour of apple maps. Forcing a poorer product on users shows contempt for users.
But you can install any map app you like? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to not use an iPhone, but that’s not one of them.
Can install, but can’t default them.
Also a slightly degraded experience compared to the OEM app.
It wasn’t the app. It was the idea that rather than continue to default to a good app, they would default to their own poorer product, attempting to force it on consumers. I knew it would only get worse from there. No regrets. It’s just unfortunate that android continues to be further locked down too. It used to be more open and customisable.
On the old Nexus phones, didn’t you have to sign into Google to even use the device? At least that’s better now.
I was recently pleasantly surprised that this actually works with Siri, the former dunce child of mobile assistants. Stuff like “Remind me about X when I get in the car” also works now, so the reminder goes off when you connect to Carplay.
Add X to Y list is great for when you run out of something in the kitchen.
X is already on my Why? list.
I only use it for opening Pocket Cast lol.
BTW if anyone has an alternative for Pocket Casts that is free and multiplatform I’m all ears lol (so far Spotify seems like a good alternative, but I don’t like it as a Podcast replacement app).
I’m not crazy into podcasts, but I have no complaints with podcast republic. Although, the other suggestion for audiobookshelf is a solid one
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check it out!
I moved to Antennapod then ended up using Audiobookshelf since I was already hosting it for my wife’s audiobooks.
Interesting, what is your complete setup for desktop and mobile? Does sync work well? I mean like starting a podcast in some app and continuing it in another.
So for antennapod I used gpodder Sync. It’s not really ideal imo but hosting audiobookshelf has been perfect for me. It’s all on the server so no matter what device I’m on, everything is the same.
I like how audiobookshelf works and syncs, but their android app needs auto play/queue like the web version has. I’ve been listening to “Robot or Not” and episodes are like 2-8 minutes. Gets real annoying to keep needing to select the next episode. Especially while driving as it’s unsafe. The android auto syncing isn’t great either.
AntennaPod is nicer in that way, but I haven’t found a good web player that syncs with it.
But pocketcasts is already free, open source and multi platform right?
I use Antennapod on Android, it syncs with Gpodder (which requires self hosting on Nextcloud) and then there’s plenty of compatible clients over on desktop
Thanks for the recommendation, but oh boy, I would prefer to be away from Nextcloud (I have a Synology NAS with its own stuff which I access through VPN), I barely use it and I swear it breaks each update lol
I’m also not a fan of exposing it as I know I wouldn’t take care of it properly… And I am behind a CGNAT and just shut down my VPS…
they have become slightly more aggressive with ads lately.
Huh, well, I guess we can’t have the best of both worlds 😅
That’s all it didn’t horribly fail at
I do a job where my hands are potentially full and I cannot touch my phone for extended periods of time. I use the assistant for as much as it will let me…
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 includes all smart switches, lights, thermostats, and so on in my house
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.
Yes, I ask it random things like “is X food dog safe” or how many g of protein is in whatever food.
Or even general knowledge stuff like “how do covalent bonds work”
Dont forget adding to your shopping list and opening the list
There’s a lot of functionality that a lot of people could like using, but you have to go out of your way to learn about it all.
Gemini is slower to respond to tasks (for now, at least), can’t do all the things assistant can do, and can’t do anything at all without being on data.
“Make a big farting noice” is very popular with my kids
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I’m confused. There is no assistant app as far as I can tell. It seems to just be part of the OS.
I don’t see a Gemini app either though.
I think it’s still supposed to come out in the EU, if that’s where you’re at, Google releases launch in the EU with a delay for likely legal reasons
Google assistant “app”: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.googleassistant&hl=en&gl=US
I think once it’s rolled out in your region, the assistant will pester you to switch to Gemini.
There is no Gemini app of any kind for me either.
Interesting. I use it all the time but I don’t have a separate app installed for it.
What if I don’t use Assistant? Does it still have access to other parts of my phone?
It looks like you can switch the assistant to the old one, and then turn that one off.
But just like Microsoft, Google is going to use this technology everywhere. If in the future (or now, if it is already available to you), you use features to describe images, summarize data, create texts, you probably will be using some form of Gemini.
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Ask Google to rename theirs.
Or just wait a few years
I knew they were going to end up going full gemini, but this seems too soon to pull such shenanigans, considering it’s still slow to respond, can’t do several things that assistantcan do, and is 100% useless when not on data.
Gemini nano is data optional accepting to Google
accepting?
in fact it can only interact with your phone by generating google assistant commands and passing them on
I tried it, then uninstalled pretty quickly. If I say, “Play music” then 10% of the time it would play music, and the other 90% it would tell me it can’t. Same with many other assistant commands like controlling lights.
What even is the option here? When Google got rid of adding things to lists, I started my official transition away from them by moving to Proton, self hosting more stuff, etc. But for a voice assistant it seems like open source just isn’t there yet, it doesn’t have the hardware, and my only remaining option is to switch to Amazon (no.) Or Apple.
I’m pretty sure they fired their Google assistant team already, so that’s probably part of it.
The amount of hue shift in that phone display in the photo is hilarious.
I loved being able to open up Assistant to quickly summarize an article for me, but Gemini requires me to also attach the URL to its context and then type/say “Summarize” and then hit the submit button only to wait longer for the summary.
The only pro I can think about is that I can continue to ask for details about or related to the article.
Lovely, that’s a trick I haven’t tried on Andorid.
Can you set reminders/timers with it?
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What can it assist me with?
“Gemini, set an alert for when Google dumps you and goes back to the assistant.”
😭I just want convenient software that makes my life better, is that too much to ask
it’s not as if the default assistant was actually good. can’t make it any worse, at least
And somehow they did. It can’t interact with things like lights that the other one can.
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I don’t know what that means.
There was some Internet outrage the other day: Google pauses Gemini’s ability to generate people after overcorrecting for diversity in historical images
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