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Why are Google's Assistant(s) so bad nowadays?

Introduction

Why does Google insist on making it's assistant situation so bad?

In theory, assistant should be the best it's ever been. It's better at "understanding" what I ask for, and yet it less capable than ever to do so.

This post is a rant about my experience using modern assistants on Android, and why, while I used to use these features actively in the mid-to-late-2010s, I now don't even bother with them.

The task

Back in the late 2010s, I used to be able to hold the home button and ask the Google Assistant to create an event based on this email. It would grab the context from my screen, and do exactly that. This has been impossible, as far as I can tell, to do for years now.

Trying to find the "right" assistant

At some point, my phone stopped responding to "OK Google". I still don't know why it won't work.

Holding down the Home bar (the home button went the way of the dodo) brings up an assistant-style UI, but it's dumb as bricks and only Googles the web. Useless.

So, I installed Gemini. I asked it to perform a basic task. It responded "in live mode, I cannot do that". Asking it how I can get it to create me a calendar event, it could not answer the question. Saying instead to open my calendar app and create a new event. I know how to use a calendar. I want it to justify its existence by providing more value than a Google search. It was ultimately unable to answer the question.

Searching the internet, apparently both of the ways I had been using assistant features were the wrong way to do it. You have to hold down the power button, that's how to launch the proper one. My internal response was:

No, that's for the power menu. I don't want to dedicate it to Assistant.

Well, apparently, that's the only way to do it now, so there I go sacrificing another convenience turning it on.

Pulling teeth with Gemini

So I ask this power-menu-version of Gemini to do the same simple task. I tried 4 separate times.

First, it created a random event "Meeting with a client" on a completely different day (what?).

Second time it just crashed with an error.

The third time, it asked me which email to use, giving me a list, but that list did not contain the email I was interested in. I asked it to find the Royal Mail one. No success.

So, quite clearly, it wasn't using screen content.

I rephrased the question: "Please create an event from the content on my screen". It replied "Sure, when's this for?"

I shouldn't have to tell you. That's the point. It's right there.

Conclusion

There are too many damn assistant versions, and they are all bad. I can't even imagine what it's like to also have Bixby in the mix as a Samsung user. (Feel free to let me know below.)

It seems like none of them are able to pull context from what you are doing anymore, and you'll spend more time fiddling and googling how to make them work than it would take for you to do the task yourself.

In some ways, assistants have gotten worst than almost 10 years ago, despite billions in investments.

As a little bonus, the internet is filled with AI slop that makes finding out real facts, real studies from real people harder than ever.

I write this all mostly to blow off steam, as this stuff has been frustrating me for years now. Let me know what your experience has been like below, I could use some camaraderie.

68 comments
  • Oh boy! Finally I can share my experiences with Gemini. One day it just replaced my Google Assistant which I used on my phone to quickly search simple queries, setting timers and alarms and not much more.

    One day I asked for a simple search for synonyms of "oddball", noticed the Assistant was replaced and asked why. Proof these are my first interactions from my history:

    here's its response, with casual admission to copyright infringement highlighted by me:

    and when I said I don't care and asked about Assistant again, it of course being the genius that it is, didn't even make a connection to the context (very conversational indeed) and acted like I was asking about what happened to Assistant like I was looking for tech support:

    when I asked about the voice it failed to tell me that it had many different voices I could choose from, literally one of the most basic things it could tell me about itself:

    also demonstrating how incredibly unnecessarily verbose it is about everything. Google Assistant was much more concise.

    so here's my next few questions, the responses are BS so they don't matter:

    then I asked what's different about it and it outright lied about things it already demonstrated to be false:

    Enhanced Understanding and Advanced Reasoning already proven wrong by treating my question about Assistant as a tech support question rather than a question about why it was replaced by Gemini.

    Enhanced Factual Knowledge proven wrong by not even having basic knowledge about itself. Demonstrated above that I asked about the voice and all it could say was "if you don't like it sorry" rather than tell me it already had options for different voices.

    This is too long and I'm just starting. Will continue in replies...

    • because it said "these are just a few examples" and it said nothing of value so far, I wanted more:

      I was baffled that it had no contextual clues about what I said, mind that the non-AI Assistant was usually good at this. And once again, unnecessarily verbose answer, and treating my question as a tech support problem:

      Here it is telling me that I should provide context each time like a fucking idiot because that's how intelligence works, right?

      Then I pointed out this is objectively worse than Assistant and it replied with a fucking essay. Please don't read this.

      I'll just provide TLDR- both have different strengths. Google Assistant is better at things that are useful and Gemini is better at things that don't fucking matter at all:

      I asked a couple more questions about Assistant's advantages over Gemini. It barely understood but essentially reiterated that Assistant was just better at things that are useful. So I asked more hoping for more complex things AI could do:

      The answer is no, and instead it wrote me another fucking essay that I'll skip here, about different apps I could use for automation like IFTTT. Because that's what I want an assistant for, to tell me go do things myself.

      I still wanted to see if I could make use of things so I kept it for a while. It answered some simple questions about synonyms and meanings of words. I like this one in particular:

      anyway this is basically the end of the introductory period. I'll continue with a reply for the actual meat.

      • Here's Gemini not knowing what the fuck it even is and what it can do:

        Wrong on two levels: It is supposed to be a voice assistant and yes you can choose voices for it.

        Failing to understand basic sentences:

        I think I may have typed it just so it could understand but no help, "try voice":

        So I try voice and it fails to understand again:

        Failing to parse basic syntax:

        I try to ask again:

        It replies in that language that of course it can! Soooo next prompt:

        Failing to understand again... How does "dictate" sound like "succeed":

        Try again, it's finally ready:

        But it keeps trying to interpret what I say in English right after, and a real life Who's on First routine ensues:

        Ok... Can you interpret anything on my screen? You know Google Assistant did it for a while.

        I try the "live" conversation. Which is supposed to help continue so you don't keep repeatingly initiate prompts. Cool, but it literally cannot do anything during this mode:

        still going with Live, another Who's on First routine ensues as it thinks I'm referring to the timer I set way before:

        apparently the timer doesn't even work, still 3:59 left? maybe it was cached, so I ask again to confirm:

        oh never mind. it went up.


        finally a while later I encountered some sort of error message that mentioned Siri. I wish I would have screenshot it at the time but I couldn't think of it. But I either asked whether it used Siri's code or just why it mentioned Siri at all... something like that. I can't tell you exactly because it's not showing up in my history:

        but I think it denied having any connection to Siri because I apparently accused it of lying. of course it can't even parse the word "Siri's" from context:


        Sometime later I ask for default Microsoft fonts:

        I promise you that this is not my accent or anything. I've been devouring English since I was a little kid, native English speakers are usually surprised I'm not a native speaker. It's just so much worse at understanding words, by its own admission (one of the advantages it listed for Assistant over Gemini was voice recognition, though it claimed it was a slight advantage)

        I try to correct it and say I meant "Microsoft fonts", it interprets it—hilariously—much much worse:

        I try to spell the word "font" and hope it will get it but while the spelling works, it somehow interprets "Microsoft" as "humps"???


        Finally my last interaction. Basic prompt, I ask the value of $20 in my own currency. This prompt works with Assistant all the time, it knows where I am and what currency I use so this should be easy, right?

        I am frustrated and say how it can't understand what I meant. IT MISINTERPRETS THE CURRENCY I MEANT AND WAS STILL NOT HELPFUL EVEN IF THE INTERPRETATION WAS CORRECT:

        lastly another unhelpful response with a fucking essay just to go back:

        I manually switched back and I can at least do basic shit with Assistant.

    • Yeah this is emblematic of modern LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT. Needlessly verbose, confidently wrong, less capable of actually doing things.

  • I have a theory that this is intentional design.

    When products perform smoothly, you don't interact with them, they become invisible, & Uncle Googs needs you interacting with their products as much as possible.

    Thanks to telemetry, Good Ol' Uncle Googs has millions of hours of behavioral patterns to sift through, provided by all those free Chromebooks for school districts across the US.

    So Google know exactly what gets folks engaging with their phones &, I believe, intentionally cause frustration over seemingly simple tasks b/c many many people will forget what they were doing, fix the issue, then get distracted by entertainment apps, doom scrolling, etc.

    Dark patterns & behavioral manipulation.

  • because in order to make it kind of work, you have to enable the settings that record all your data

  • Fortunately, you can just append the word "Reddit" to your Internet query and it'll take you straight to the most helpful answer...

    Well, shit:-(.

    Stack overflow also had a similar situation causing people to strike.

    Enshittification has ruined so much in the world of tech.

  • Bixby is better at basic tasks on the phone, like a calendar meeting.

    Gemini is better at controlling my lights and to talk about something not too objective, like asking about cooking recipes. Or it's not bad if you need to calculate solution strengths while mixing drinks or smth. But aside from maths and other fixed constants, it's really shit at any sort of facts.

    You can not get a reliable answer to as when a show/movie is airing because the times announced usually shift a bit and the datasets are old. In last December, before Kraven the Hunter was premiering, I asked it when that would be. It told me, in December 2024, that "Kraven the Hunter will premier in May 2024" or something. As in the future tense. And date 6 months in the past.

    So yeah.

    They're useful for certain things but they're still far from anything akin to Jarvis, lol. I've been meaning to give the one free month of Gemini Pro a go just out of curiosity at some point to see whether it's equally shit.

    I can definitely see potential in these. It's pretty nice being able to control my lights just by telling my phone what colour where, how much light. Also I use it for a smart plug on my screen so when I'm watching things in bed I can just hit pause and tell google to shut my screen off for me instead of having to get out of bed or put it on standby (because then the annoying blue led will stay on).

68 comments