Not sold is putting it very mildly. I found a fix for all of the bullshit though: you go into the default apps area and you choose none for assistant. Before I did that they had sideloaded fucking Gemini onto my phone via Android Auto and when I was trying to navigate somewhere I had to speak to some useless middle manager Gemini guy that didn’t like cursing before he passed it off to the virtual woman to do the actual navigation. Google: bringing the patriarchy to your digital assistants.
Yeah, I switched my launcher to Lawnchair because they put the AI button right where my right thumb would touch the search bar. It seemed like it was also by design. My launcher now looks identical to the stock launcher on the Pixel, except without an AI button.
The desperate forced adoption of “AI” seems more like rape than marketing.
I disabled Gemini. But unfortunately they tied a whole host of features I really liked about my phone to that fucking thing. And now they’re all unusable. Google has effectively made themselves useless to me. There is now literally no point in having Android over any other OS that exists.
Good news for you, iOS’ Siri will now be Gemini
I can not for the life of me figure out a single problem or need I have in my life where the solution is “more technology”.
I could not care less. I’m at zero Kelvin for technology. Nothing’s moving, there’s no interaction, I do not care.
But what about shareholders?
With sick Pam Bondi on the White House’s new advisory council on AI, Android users are right to avoid Gemini.
Again, add this to the ‘no shit’ bag
Big woop. Over the last year or so, it moved from “can reliably set a timer” to having to yell at it, multiple times, crossing an unexpected amount of hurdles, to get it to maybe understand that you want to set a timer, and god forbids that you want it with a specific name and duration. Oh, and the icing on the cake : it worked perfectly when it was locally running on the phone, and started going downhill when they pulled the plug on that.
I wonder why people aren’t sold on such wonderful tech.
It’s not Intelligent. I call it Artificial Incompetence.
I have Actual Intelligence and Google has Anti Intelligence in their stuff now.
With Gemini Intelligence, Google plans to take Gemini’s agentic capabilities to the next level, where it can also handle complex tasks, such as finding the most suitable guided tours that fit your specific requirements.
Why would anyone do that ?
Seems its just an answer still searching for a question.
The majority of people’s issue with AI is that it’s an unhelpful level of competence. It’s obviously advanced enough that it isn’t just a basic automation tool while at the same time being stupid enough that you would never trust its output. This puts it in an awkward cultural point where it’s use is effectively nullified by its own incapabilities.
Essentially I spend about as much time fact checking it as it would if I just done the task myself.
I swear we were told when all this started the AI was going to bring about a cultural revolution give us Star Trek replicators and warp drive.
AI is like a 5 year old that can write perfect english, is really good at arguing his point but totally lacks self reflection skills and likes to make up stuff.
LLMs are just knowledge replicators. There are multiple Star Trek episodes that feature this kind of technology without any actuall intelligence but incredibly good at replicating preexisting knowledge and experiences.
Like the Drone that Picard encountered where he lived an entire life in a civilisation that had died long ago. Or basically all Holodeck Episodes.
Still actual intelligence with creative thought is something somehow different.
Tbf 5 years could really argue their point if you just believe they are not 5. Something about having infinite confidence.
I never wanted AI on my phone, period. I don’t care which one. The Google Assistant was more than enough, if not too much. Never got asked if I wanted any of this shit, it was just forcefully added into every fucking thing.
My old ass phone, Google pushed out AI. (I plan to swap to GrapheneOS soon). It’s less useful than Assistant. And features are disappearing.
My Windows 10 PC… fucking AI added. To be honest, never opened it.
Because I use Android Auto when driving, technically, thanks to Google, I have AI there too. And as stated, it’s less functional than the original assistant.
Drive-thru… AI. It’s slower and less accurate than a person. Only upside, because it doesn’t have a budget mic from the 1980’s it’s clearer than a person.
Work… AI. Co-Pilot for VSCode, as a tool, it’s fine, get’s a lot wrong. But I had some upper manager claim they recreated DoorDash in like 5 minutes with AI (clearly they didn’t). We just had a recent wave of layoffs (I survived). But they are monitoring AI usage to ensure we use enough per month…
News?.. AI. Both good or bad news about it, I’m just so fucking sick of the exact same things. Trump, AI, Trump, AI, Trump, AI… that’s all it is, all the time. Just how both are fucking everyone.
About 30% of my interactions with Google assistant were me asking for a joke, 20% ended in frustration that it didn’t accomplish whatever task I hoped to do hands-free, 40% getting pissed at it responding to “okay” when it wasn’t supposed to and 10% that it didn’t respond when I wanted it to.
Eventually I turned off the voice activation entirely, and my number of interactions since has sharply decreased.
Now I’m throwing it out entirely.
But they are monitoring AI usage to ensure we use enough per month…
Tokenmaxxing for the win
I had some upper manager claim they recreated DoorDash in like 5 minutes with AI
lol k
It’s like letting a street drug dealer be your doctor. You don’t want to find out what they’re gonna mix into your food.
why is your doctor cooking for you?
i dont want to use AI at all, anywhere, lol. google/samsung tried to force bixby down our throats and now they’re doing the same with Gemini. i dont want any part of it!!!
Ngl, ai isnt a problem atleast for me, i use ai locally on my phone and it’s just better for asking something, brainstorming etc… But companies pushing ai where its not needed is the shitty thing
Ok Grandpa.
I’d take a semi-aware grandpa any time over a completely tech-oblivious, doom-scrolling facebook-and-X-twat 😁
Go do some vibe coding ya neckbeard.
I prefer paying people to do that, but thanks.
So just a hypocrite then.
So just a troll then.
Brother, its okay not to be okay. Theres help for everyone out there.
Trolls gonna troll. This here is what we call a false equivalency. Paying to have a person use their skills to complete a complex technical task with liability is far different from using an environment destroying, unreliable and insecure technology that carries no liability to do a worse job. One funds a person that will circulate that income, the other goes to a mega Corp where a billionaire will sleep on that money like an IRL Smaug.
You’re cute. Are you available as a plushie?
Yes
Spotted the AI loving troglodyte
Elon? where?
Actually the bandwagon shifted and it’s you on the wrong side LMAO fucking lemmings.
Why not fuck off back to reddit, then?
You fucking wish, loser
You’re the lemming though. You’re the one who jumped on the bandwagon.
Wild that people just casually admit to outsourcing their thinking to a machine. I’d never willing post something that embarrassing. Butlerian Jihad Now.
I’m not going to lie I use AI. It is better then search for looming things up. And I have vibe coded a few niche things for myself.
Go back to candles and charcoal pencil on tree bark then. Take it all the way, you are against all forms of technological improvement while communicating online. Your hypocrisy is leaking.
yea but have you tried it?
i’ve been doing so for a week and i feel smarter already
no, maybe I’m prejudiced against rocks
Nah you just have innovation bias. Newer does not automatically mean better. That’s a wild take in 2026 since all of these companies have been marching towards enshitification for a decade.
Plenty of research showing that use of AI is just offloading your cognitive function. We know enough about neuroplasticity to clearly see this will impair those who use it for everything. It’s important to be challenged sometimes, the illusion of intelligence does nothing for us.
Your brain is leaking
That implies there’s something to leak.
*grandma, you ugly bitch :)
Ok Claude.
You’d think someone as artistic as you would understand how insane it is to blindly accept AI.
Artistic? I see nothing in their posts to prove that they haven’t been reposting from other sources or straight up posting slop. Not that post history is everything, I’m not one to post myself, but based on the pro-AI stance, I am fully willing to believe the latter.
I gave them the benefit of doubt instead of accusing them without evidence.
Gemini is fucking garbage, it’s useless as an assistant and Google destroyed Assistant which could do genuinely helpful things like navigate hands free, set timers reliably and without Internet connections, set calendar reminders, etc.
Try to use voice commands to navigate now?
Gemini tells you to use the Maps app.
Fuck you Gemini, that’s not helpful at all.
Get your shit together Google.
I rely on Android Auto in my commute. A couple of weeks ago maps wasn’t displaying correctly, so I rebooted my phone. All of a sudden assistant was replaced… 30km later I pulled over and switched it back.
If I’m writing an SMS, I want it written, not start a dialogue with some temu hal9000 clone.
The funny thing is there’s no reason for it to be so shitty just because they use Gemini for it. LLMs can use tools if given access. There’s no reason they can’t give it a tool to use intents to launch activities. I can run their own open weight Gemma model in llama.cpp and I’m pretty sure it can call tools.
Lately I feel like Google or Microsoft could pay me like a million a year and I could single-handedly fix their most broken products and the AI doesn’t even have to go. Teams? Don’t care how much tracking they put in it, it can be made more performant and the UI can be made usable. Gemini? Could legitimately be fixed to do everything the old Google assistant did and more. Outlook though? Yeah that one has to go. No saving it anymore.
Add some keyword along the lines “Tell Google Assistant to…”
It’s really good at setting alarms. That’s all I’ve ever used it for. It sets multiple alarms so I don’t have to fiddle with the annoying alarm clock interface on my phone.
. The biggest of them involves how Gemini could bear the load of mundane or mindless tasks you do on your phone or other Android devices.
Like…what?
can it block ads in the iphone
I used it on long drive this week to find local NPR stations. It was actually pretty good at that.
Then I asked it to reroute me using a different road and it said it couldn’t do that lmao. Also couldn’t understand that I wanted to find the next Wendy’s on my route despite clearly stating that multiple times. Just kept telling me to backtrack to go to random Wendy’s in the area.
So basically worthless except for finding npr stations. And even then it would vomit out a bunch of irrelevant info like the station ID and what kind of content they have. Like dude I don’t care, I just asked for the fucking frequency ffs.
What a typical phone user does on their phone?
- Overwhelmingly - scroll social media
- Messaging
- listen to music
- watch videos
- make some pictures and videos
- scan QR codes
- maybe - send files
- maybe - download and print out a PDF
- maybe - read a book
- maybe, JUST MAYBE - stock/currency/crypto trading
Influencers may be using their phone more for editing and filming, but that is it.
Nothing I can think of would benefit from AI. Maybe trading, but that AFAIK is a terrible idea.
Edit: Forgot messaging. AI doesn’t help with this one much either.
One of my broker gives me AI-advice on trading. And yeah, that is reaaaaaaly a bad idea 😂
Chat, you forgot chat. But yes, that’s about. Nothing AI could do for me, even if I really really really wanted it to.
I guess they don’t even know themselves but are forced to market the shit. And usually people will just gulp down what gets pushed into their throat, digitally.
AI trading assistant for everyone is an absolutely excellent concept!
It allows you to directly control the market by having the “AI” tell masses what you want them to push for. Best part - doesn’t even need to be AI, you can just claim it’s the AI that generates your “advices” and take no responsibility for your own orchestrations.
Absolutely amazing, you no longer have to fool people into performing certain actions like Trump is doing. You just tell them directly.
Exactly, we don’t need it for anything. I have zero tasks that I need automation for on my phone. In fact, I have typically zero tasks that I need to do on my phone at all.
You know what tasks I actually NEED to do? I need to mow my back yard, and I need to install gutters on my house. AI is not going to help any of that, so it’s useless for my needs. Meanwhile, it is wasting a fortune in energy and an environmental crisis worth of water.
Back when I used an iPhone, I had a few automations through Shortcuts, but nothing critical. Then I got a Pixel, put Graphene on it, and started learning how Android works. At the same time I went all in on Home Assistant over Alexa.
It’s been over a year now, so I figured I’d see what I can automate between my phone and my house.
The short answer is: nothing.
There is absolutely nothing that I need my phone to do automatically. Not a single task I need it to accomplish on my behalf.
I saw a post on Reddit a few weeks ago in the Tasker sub. A guy was talking about how one of his automations was to send a randomly selected affirmation or quote from some website to each of his loved ones at 7am. I’m still not quite over that level of psychopathy. The notion that the correct way to show affection is to have an automation randomly select a message to send them every morning.
The only 2 tasks that have been worth automating for me on my phone is time-based volume/vibration switching and VPN turn-on and off when I am on home internet or away.
No need to steal people’s water to do it.
But AI could totally tell you the top rated lawn mowers in stock in your area based on fake bought and paid for reviews to optimize your efficiency at mowing your lawn and increasing the capitalist profit margins of local stores that pay Google for increased foot traffic to their stores.
“Need” really imposes some incredibly urgent something.
I actually do love automation, but why use ai for that? Macrodroid, tasker, automate… But hey, they NEED us to need it.
Paying for parking in my city requires a phone.
You either have to use the QR code, a text message, or call a line with an auto-attendant. There is no physical kiosk on the street to use.
Set a 5 minute timer
That’s really it.
Wow. Is this possible nowadays? What a time to be alive. But can it be also a 10m timer? What about 1m? I’m skeptical…
It depends. 10 is okay. 15 is usually fine.
14 minutes has a 50/50 chance of being 40 minutes.
See? I knew it was half-assed. But maybe i can download an extra 14-min-timer-app?
Like stuff. Don’t worry about it. AI will take care of everything. Now shut up and let us announce 20 more datacenters in peace.
Stop thinking. AI will do it for you. Just offload all thought and skill to our machines and believe whatever they say.
Stuff you say? That’s the thing I like most! I’m so exited. We need more data centers!
Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!
My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!
Lol. It sure will change all our lifes. Maybe just not the way we expect it…
Browsing Lemmy 😁
So it could do that for me? That’d be awesome, wouldn’t even need my phone for that anymore!
“Gemini, do everything I would’ve done on this phone today, so I can do something else, like plowing your mom or do my taxes”.
I love the future!
The use case for AI assistants seems to be reserving tables at a restaurant.
If that would spare me a human interaction then that’d be considered a plus! At least.
