[firecall]

Just to add, I am mainly an iPhone user. But I have a Google Pixel 6a for dev and testing reasons.

And Google Gemini for the voice assistant is excellent fun!

Just being able to ask it weird and wonderful whilst on a road trip with the kids is worth the cost of a cheap Pixel phone alone!

[jofzar]

I have to seriously disagree on it for the "assistant" part. It is so terrible vs Google assistant.

There have been two really bad experiences that I had which boggled my mind.

These are transcribed because these were so bad I took a screenshot.

Example 1: "set an alarm for 15 minutes"

> Gemini sets the alarm for 1:15pm

"I want that to be 50 minutes"

> "you can change the duration of alarms in the clock app"

Example 2:

"what the temperature today"

> It is currently 5 degrees Celsius

- It was October in Sydney, the temperature was 22c with a low of 12c.....

[morsch]

Gemini never sets alarms for me and always points me to the app. Trying to call people is a crap shoot. Presumably there are settings for this somewhere, but there are like fifty sharing settings in four different places and it's impossible to know which apply to the old assistant or Gemini or both or just on the lock screen or to connected devices or... It's a mess.

It's even worse, when I tell it to set a timer now, it'll happily tell me it's been set -- but it hasn't (nothing in the app and I waited, to be sure). This is all reproducible and on a Pixel 8.

[jofzar]

Timer works for me, it uses the "utilities" connection to do it.

I wonder if your utilities is disconnected, because it's the same for the alarm

[morsch]

Thanks, apparently utilities is disabled because I disabled something called Apps Activity because the data sharing involved seemed both bonkers and vague.

Sharing chat transcripts I'd hate but deal with, but they're also getting files and images shared (ie possibly my screen whenever it thinks it heard hey Google or registers a double tap), related product usage which could mean anything, and seemingly unrestricted access to your location. https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?sjid=12105...

Not sure why I can use Gemini in general but can't have it set up an alarm without all that. Or why the AI thinks it can set up an alarm when it doesn't. I guess I'll opt in and try it out a bit.

[nicpottier]

It was really bad at first for this type of thing. I just tried a few of them because I too had given up on them and they seem to work perfectly now. It even cancelled the alarm I had previously set when I simply said "cancel the last alarm".

[arcanemachiner]

Try setting a "timer" for 15 minutes instead of an "alarm".

Not sure if this is a regional dialect thing, but in North America, a timer has a duration, but an alarm is set for a specific time, which would possibly explain the confusion.

[wccrawford]

While I agree it'd let the user use the system, the system should do the right thing for either situation, or at least abort and say it doesn't understand. That's the problem with LLMs so far. They can't admit they don't understand.

[gundmc]

> October in Sydney

These sound like fairly dated anecdotes. I don't doubt them at all - I had similar horror stories. I disabled Gemini on my phone in order to keep the old assistant for a long time, but it really has gotten a lot better in the last few months.

[jofzar]

March 11th was when the alarm one was From, these are just ones that I have screenshot because they were so bad I shared with a friend.

https://imgur.com/a/nj4newx

Edit: I just asked it for the weather this week and it only showed today. Like this is Amateur hour stuff, Siri 1.0 stuff.

https://imgur.com/a/81mz98Y

[gundmc]

I can replicate your weather one! I think it's taking "this week" extremely literally and the week ends on Saturday. Asking for "this weekend" gives Saturday and Sunday. Asking for the next few days gives 3 days out, etc .

Definitely not addressing the spirit of the request.

[AnonymousPlanet]

GP said they were in Sydney. As far as I know, the week officially starts on Monday in Australia. That's also the case for most of Europe, BTW. Maybe their locale wasn't set right or it's another case of American software assuming weird American standards for the rest of the world.

[OJFord]

I didn't know this about the USA - but it's still called 'the weekend'? (GP uses it at least) ..Even though 50% of it is apparently 'the weekstart'?

[jofzar]

> and the week ends on Saturday.

Except it doesn't, in literally every other country other then Japan, USA and Canada it ends on Sunday.

Edit: https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/first-day-of-the-w...

I'm wrong on the countries, it's more split then I thought. Regardless it's wrong for my geo which google knows I'm in.

[cmrdporcupine]

<rant>Google is seemingly giving up on localization entirely. The whole world gets to be Yankee.

It's now started giving me F temperatures on my homescreen, for no particular reason. It knows I'm in Canada. I have set my units in the past to metric. What gives?

I still don't have Canadian English as a locale in Android or Chrome, after what, 15 years of Android? It's got words highlighted all over my page here as mis-spellings. They're not. I really did mean to type colour you piece of crap. I can switch to British but then get spanked for colourize instead of colourised etc.

And it seems to tie choice of English variant to things like pronounciation of words and accent for voice assistant. My car speaks to me in a British accent because I have it set to British English (the closest thing to my own spellings).

They never even tried to handle the facts of the (40M person) Canadian bilingual market. Navigation is either French or English, but many Canadian road sides are in both and it tries to read them out and butchers the pronounciations. Drive into Quebec and have your phone set to English and it's laughable what it does. (Notably doesn't do this for Spanish words in the US, which it seems to have no problem with).</>

[aprilthird2021]

Yeah I find myself actually talking to the Gemini assistant like I never have to any other