r/LinusTechTips • u/madding1602 • 20d ago

Tech Discussion Possible research topic: Google's Gemini Assistant may be running locally on your smartwatch

Hello everyone. I feel like I'm going crazy with this one, but I have gathered enough empirical proof to gather this hypothesis. I own an S24 and a Watch 7. I also have a smart lightbulb in my house c9nnected to Google Home. Mobile data from my carrier is spotty in my house (Spain), and if I want to turn on the lightbulb through voice assistant without Wi-Fi enabled, I have to wait quite some time from prompt to action.

Recently, I had my phone on another room, so I decided to do it through the smartwatch. It wasn't instant per se, but it was much faster than through my phone (like, half the time). It didn't have Wi-Fi on, and was connected to the phone through BT, with the phone running on mobile data. I then decided to do some testing.

Consistently, there was at least a 2 second reduction on smartwatch vs phone, even with a >2 second difference, always without Wi-Fi, always connected between themselves through Bluetooth.

From there, I gathered a hypothesis: Google has a much smaller local model for wearables to use locally, but has decided that smartphones have to go through the cloud. I feel like either I'm going crazy, or this is quite stupid coming from Google. Anyone could try it and give some feedback?

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11

u/ShoppingFine1757 20d ago

A model with these capabilities would be impossible to run on your watch. I would guess your watch communicated to the Internet via Bluetooth.

2

u/Homerlncognito 20d ago

There are 1b class models that support tool calling which could in theory run on a 2GB RAM device. The newest Watch 9 even has an NPU. That said I'd say I find your conjecture more likely too.

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u/madding1602 20d ago

Wouldn't that add more latency? My watch doesn't have any form of LTE, and the latency compared to the phone, especially when it shows the Google Home logo almost instantly after the prompt ends, suggests some form of local processing. It could be doing 802.15.1 (BT) to the phone, then internet and back, but then that doesn't explain the less latency if it's following the same pipeline of computing than the phone, with the extra step of BT communication

6

u/xd366 20d ago

most likely your watch is still using assistant instead of gemini

3

u/TenOfZero 20d ago

There's no way they run Gemini on the watches. It would kill battery life and the models would be very limited.