This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Done
The AI part runs in the cloud or on the phone?
Cloud. LLMs aren't there where they can be run on phones at conversational speed yet.
They absolutely are if you run something like open chat 1.5B, they just want to lock people into their ecosystem.
I guess you can scale it down enough. But if it's worse than chatgpt 3.5 people will call it terrible and that's not really what they want right now
It would still be better than the default Google assistant
yay, more nonsense added to stock android (degoogle now)
After being on Graphene for the past 2 years,I decided to reinstall with no google at all,since my bank app now works without any google services dependencies.
hooray for me,I'm finally free and can profit from multiuser installed sandboxed services in another user profile if needed.
Glad to be out of this downward spiral.
What do you mean exactly by “no google at all”? How do you get rid of it of not using Graphene (I know google pay doesn’t work with that, which is a big showstopper for me). Looking for alternatives :)
sorry,I realized now I didn't mention what I reinstalled and it's still Graphene,but with no Google services framework installed. Pure stock Graphene with only their apps.
Is this gonna be one of those tech bandwagon things that Google fails at so consistently? You know, like Google phones, Google Plus, Google Pay, Google Stadia, Google Your Poodle, etc.
Google pay and google phones are failures?
Both are THE standard for their respective industries, what you on about?
Google phones are some of the most popular in the marketplace (and their os is the most popular in the world) and Google pay works absolutely fine - I use it everyday, albeit with the new name of wallet.
It's default? When I downloaded it, I had to manually choose Gemini to be the default. It wasn't set like that for me.
It's not only the default: you can choose to use the old assistant on Gemini's config, but the next time you open Gemini it's as if you just installed it and it sets itself as the default again.
Weird, maybe the Pixel build is slightly different, because that's not happening on mine and I believe I've already got the latest updates for it.
Can you set reminders/timers with it?
"Gemini, set an alert for when Google dumps you and goes back to the assistant."
😭I just want convenient software that makes my life better, is that too much to ask
it's not as if the default assistant was actually good. can't make it any worse, at least
And somehow they did. It can't interact with things like lights that the other one can.
Do people use Assistant for more than just reminders, weather, and directions? Lol Just curious because that's all I use it for.
You use the assistant?
Simple timers, controlling the lights, background music, reminders, and occasionally thing like "how many tablespoons in a pint".
I don't ask it for the weather because I don't want a 30 second lecture on the weather, and it won't give me "cold now, hot later, might rain between".
Given that Gemini seem to be unable to give short answers, and it can't control stuff, it's missing most of what I require.
Odd I seem to be able to control all my IOT devices no problem so far from Gemini with voice commands over the phone. This includes all smart switches, lights, thermostats, and so on in my house
It seems to function a little quicker in response with the voice commands IMO.
Oh interesting. I'll have to check it out again. When I first tried it I asked it to turn off the lights and it said it couldn't interact with the outside world, a d some searching said they hadn't implemented that yet, so away it went.
I do a job where my hands are potentially full and I cannot touch my phone for extended periods of time. I use the assistant for as much as it will let me...
I've only ever activated it by accident (I think it's double-click the power button on my phone). Never actually used the thing.
One of the first things I disabled was the assistant.
I only use it for opening Pocket Cast lol.
BTW if anyone has an alternative for Pocket Casts that is free and multiplatform I'm all ears lol (so far Spotify seems like a good alternative, but I don't like it as a Podcast replacement app).
I use Antennapod on Android, it syncs with Gpodder (which requires self hosting on Nextcloud) and then there's plenty of compatible clients over on desktop
But pocketcasts is already free, open source and multi platform right?
I use and like Castbox for podcasts. It's great, though they have become slightly more aggressive with ads lately.
I moved to Antennapod then ended up using Audiobookshelf since I was already hosting it for my wife's audiobooks.
"set a timer for X minutes" And "set an alarm for X AM" are super helpful
Add X to Y list is great for when you run out of something in the kitchen.
X is already on my Why? list.
I've tried one extra layer of complexity - "Remind me to water the plants when I get home" or something like that. It has no idea what I'm asking it to do despite knowing the "remind me" phrase and knowing where my home is.
It used to work years ago. It's not a technology problem. They changed their policy around location based reminders. One of the reasons I'm degoogling. I got rid of apple products too when they got rid of Google maps in favour of apple maps. Forcing a poorer product on users shows contempt for users.
But you can install any map app you like? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to not use an iPhone, but that's not one of them.
Haha, Google. I already type my dumb questions at DuckDuckGo
Srsly... Gemini is pretty cool tho. When I want an AI at least. (Rarely)
