A couple of weeks ago, Google released a standalone app for its AI-powered assistant,Gemini. After a few hours messing around with it, I concluded that while Gemini is very promising, it’s stillnot quite ready to replace the Google Assistant.
I’ve kept using Gemini on my phone since then, and my first impressions more or less hold up. Gemini is wildly convenient in a lot of situations where Assistant is useless, but it’s still routinely falling down on basic tasks — it can’t even reliably tell you the time.
The promise of pocket AI
Gemini justknowsthings — or acts like it does
If you’ve spent much time with the Google Assistant, you’ll know that it’s not great at giving information. It’s good with the basics: it’ll tell you the weather forecast, or when Barbie was released in theaters, or how tall Yao Ming is. But it stumbles with anything much more complex.
If you’re lucky, Assistant might be able to answer a more nuanced question by quoting text results from Google Search. But more often than not, if your query is too complicated, Assistant will just Google your question and serve you the results page.
Gemini doesn’t do that, and from a user perspective, it’s pretty incredible. You can ask Gemini just about anything, and it’ll generally answer in plain, coherent English.
Case in point: last week, I was trying to make whipped cream from scratch to go with dessert. I asked Gemini how, and it just… told me. No “I found these results on Search,” no links to paywalled recipes on NYT Cooking — just plain, easy-to-follow instructions on how to do what I needed to do. It felt genuinely futuristic.
That’s a frivolous example of what LLMs can do, of course, but it gets at the heart of what makes Gemini compelling as a digital assistant: it’s generally really good at both understanding what you’re asking it for and actually giving it to you in a frictionless way.
Gemini’s capabilities are alsoverybroad. In the time I’ve been using the app, I’ve had it summarize YouTube videos, identify plant species, and generate images of capybaras working various human jobs. All this functionality, accessible from any screen, has already started changing how I use my phone day to day, and for the most part, I’m really into it.
This is what I do when I’m killing time on my phone now. I ask Gemini for capybaras.
Growing pains
Impressive as it is, Gemini has issues
At the same time, Gemini fails spectacularly in many ways the legacy Google Assistant does not. For one, it’s just plain wrong sometimes, but you wouldn’t know it from the way it presents information.
Earlier this week, I asked Gemini for the time more than once, and it gave me inaccurate times for a different time zone. I tried again a couple of days later, and it refused to give me the time at all, saying it doesn’t have access to my location.
Why should anyone trust Gemini to stick around?
How many times will we be burned by Google?
Gemini gets confused about things the Assistant handles just fine, too. Questions I’d expect the AI to breeze through trip it up: when I ask the Gemini app on my phone “how much battery is left” (or some variation of that question), sometimes it reports my phone’s battery level, which makes sense. But sometimes, for some reason, it tells me how much charge my smart vacuum has left. It’s not clear how it decides what battery level to give me.
I also feel vaguely guilty relying on Gemini’s matter-of-fact, often unsourced information. It’s cool that I can get a recipe on demand without having to read through all the fluff typical of recipe blogs, but that fluff serves a purpose: ads on websites generate revenue that ultimately pays people who write online. AI chatbots like Gemini scrape info from those public blogs, then repeat the gist of it — a legal practice, but one that might be setting a troubling precedent.
Google’s betting big on Gemini
Assistant is on its way out
The writing’s on the wall: generative AI is in, and as more high-profile companies make investments in the space, corporate interest will only continue to grow.
Google seems to be moving fast with Gemini. In the past month alone, Google’s AI has made its way to Android,Workspace products, and eventhe Chrome browser. I have to imagine theAI everythinghype will die down eventually, but for now, it really looks like Gemini is the future of digital assistants. For better or for worse — and probably both.
