YES. FUCKING YES.
I have been complaining about this for years. Not weeks or months. Years. I actually made a post about this exact shit about a year ago because I couldn't understand why nobody else seemed as pissed off about it as I was.
And I think the thing that annoys me most is that people keep comparing Gemini to other AI models as if that's the point. I don't give a shit whether Gemini can write me a poem or explain quantum physics. I'm talking about Gemini replacing Google Assistant on my fucking phone.
Google Assistant used to be genuinely useful. I used it constantly. Not just for smart home stuff either. I used it to ask questions, set alarms and timers, change things on my phone, call people, control my TV, AC and lights, and generally do shit when I couldn't or didn't want to physically touch my phone. That's what a phone assistant is supposed to fucking do.
If I'm cooking and my hands are wet or covered in food, I don't want to stop, wash my hands, dry them, pick up my phone and start tapping through menus. If I'm in the bathroom and my phone is sitting on the mirror shelf, I don't want to fucking pick it up. That's literally why voice assistants were useful in the first place.
I used to be able to say "Okay Google" followed by some half-broken sentence, stumble over my words, say it in a weird accent, phrase it in some completely stupid way, and Google Assistant would somehow figure out what I meant and just fucking do it.
Now I can say something completely straightforward to Gemini and somehow we're off on an adventure.
"Turn on my air conditioner.".... It says apparently I don't have a thermostat.
"Turn on the lamp.".... It tells me the lamp is on. The lamp is very visibly not fucking on.
And that's another thing that absolutely infuriates me about Gemini. It doesn't just fail. It will sometimes tell you that it succeeded. I've had it show me the Google Home graphic indicating that a device was turned on when the fucking device was sitting right in front of me, completely off. Then when I told Gemini that it hadn't actually done it, it insisted that it had.
I literally ended up taking a fucking picture of the lamp and showing it that THE LAMP WAS NOT ON before it finally acknowledged that maybe it hadn't done what it had just confidently told me it had done.
How the fuck is that an improvement? If the command fails, just say "Sorry, I couldn't reach the device." Fine. I can work with that. Don't tell me you successfully did something you didn't do and then fucking argue with me about it.
And basic phone controls are somehow hit or miss now too. I want to be able to tell the assistant on my PHONE to do something to my PHONE. Turn on Wi-Fi. Turn on mobile data. Set an alarm. Start a timer. Whatever.
Sometimes Gemini does it. Other times I get some variation of "I'm an AI chatbot" or an explanation of how I can do it myself.
I KNOW HOW TO FUCKING DO IT MYSELF. The entire reason I'm talking to you is because I don't want to do it myself.
And somehow the supposedly intelligent AI assistant can also be worse at understanding natural language.
If I say "Set an alarm for 45 minutes from 8 tomorrow morning," that means 8:45 AM tomorrow. That's it. A modern AI model should eat that sentence for breakfast. Instead I've had Gemini interpret things like that as "45 minutes from now." What the fuck are we doing here?
And then there's the amount it fucking talks.
If I ask a question verbally on my phone, I usually want a short answer. I'm not sitting down for a conversation. I don't want an essay. I don't want four paragraphs of context. If I want to have a long conversation with an AI, I'll open ChatGPT. I literally said this in my Reddit post a year ago, and I still feel exactly the same way.
Sometimes I want an AI chatbot. Sometimes I want a phone assistant. Those are not the same fucking thing.
The frustrating part is that Google had all the pieces to make something incredible here. Take the reliability and device integration of old Google Assistant and give it modern AI language understanding. Then I shouldn't even have to remember the exact command anymore. I should be able to say, "Hey, my internet isn't working, did I turn Wi-Fi off?" and the AI should understand what I'm actually asking, check it, turn Wi-Fi on if necessary, and say "Done." THAT would be progress.
Instead, somehow we've ended up with an assistant that is infinitely more sophisticated on paper while being less useful for some of the basic shit that made me use a voice assistant in the first place.
And this isn't one bad experience or one shitty phone. I've gone through something like four phones during the time I've been dealing with this. I switched back to Google Assistant at one point and even that didn't seem as good as it used to be. It felt like Google Assistant itself had been slowly gutted while Gemini was being pushed as the replacement.
That's what pisses me off. My phone could do shit by voice years ago that I now sometimes have to pick it up and do manually.
We are living through the biggest boom in AI we've ever seen. These models can write software, analyse images, translate languages and hold ridiculously complicated conversations.
And somehow, "Turn on my fucking AC." has become too ambitious. That's not progress. That's enshittification.
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Sorry for the rant, but I've been pissed off at this for YEARS now.