[iury-sza]

I keep reading people complaining about this but I can't understand why. Gemini can 100% set timers and with much more subtle hints than assistant ever could. It just works. I don't get why people say it can't.

It can also play music or turn on my smart lamps, change their colors etc. I can't remember doing any special configuration for it to do that either.

Pixel 9 pro

[jdiff]

I certainly can't get it to reliably play music on my Pixel 8. Mostly it summons YT Music, only occasionally do I get my music player, and sometimes I merely get "I'm an LLM, I can't help you with that."

And you used to be able to say "Find my phone" and it would chime and max screen brightness until found. Tried that with Gemini once, and it went on with very detailed instructions on using Google or Apple's Find My Device website (depending on what type of phone I owned), maybe calling it from another device if it's not silenced, or perhaps accepting that my device was lost or stolen if none of the above worked. Did find it during that lengthy attempt at being helpful though.

Another fun example, weather. When Gemini's in control, "What's the weather like tonight?" gets a short ramble about how weather depends on climate, with some examples of what the weather might be like broadly in Canada, Japan, or the United States at night.

Unlike Assistant where you could learn to adapt to its unique phrasing preferences, you just flat out can never reliably predict what Gemini's going to do. In exchange for higher peak performance, the floor dropped out the bottom.