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- Hacker News
- google assistant has been failing at more and more extremely simple tasks the last few months. the writing was on the wall.by novia
- By design. It worked great, then they launched Gemini and moved features out of Assistant. At least Assistant can still follow basic directions like a voice command to navigate home. Gemini can't.by selicos
- This is terrible. I tried the Gemini assistant for awhile and it was a much worse experience. Just making my phone to pump up some internal stat. No way to even give feedback, just we are doing this and we don't care what you think. Google is just losing any value as a company to the consumer.by neaden
- I know I am in the minority, but the killer feature for me is (funny) a vestige from the Google Podcasts days: The "latest news" audio feed it plays back on a built-in player. You tell Assistant to "play the latest news". It plays a pre-selected roster.-
PS. Strangely it used to boilerplate back with "Here's [the/your] latest news" - now it says "Here's your news briefing" ...
... but it still works.-
I will miss that.-
by Bluestein - I'm switching to Ubuntu Touch btw.by sehw
- I got a FLX1S from FuriLabs. [0]
It currently is my backup and Bluetooth music / audio player. Actually use it more than the Fairphone used for calling. Once some more of the bugs and user experience have been polished, it will be my primary to completely ditch Android.
Turns out I like it better with having two devices while travel. One handles music and GPS navigation. While the phone is used as a phone.
Only two things I like better with the Fairphone are: 1) Ability to remove the battery. 2) Ability to swap the SIM without needing tools.
The only future I see beneficial to me and others is a de-Googled one. Apple is too much of prison cell for me to find it acceptable as an alternative.
by yndoendo - As expected (2025) https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gemini/g...
- Always stuck to the flagship google models as my primary driver (starting with the G1 in college) for the pure google experience, but between killing assistant in favor of Gemini which can't do something as simple as telling me the weather without hallucinating and the sideloading lockdown shenanigans might as well switch over to Apple fully.by jessfyi
- Don't be dramatic. Gemini is fine. I have the Google voice setup all throughout my house and haven't had any issues major enough that would want me to keep the original assistant.by Tactical45
- Why not use a custom ROM and install what you want?by duskdozer
- All the ads I get for Google Gemini are always about fake selfies so I guess fake data is its main purposeby croes
- I spent years not upgrading because when I'm in my car asking my phone to navigate somewhere, Gemini likes to say "As a large language model I can't navigate anywhere. Try using a map application on your mobile device."
It still does it, but these days you can reply: "yes you %@#$ing can, use a tool call!!" and it will
by koala_man - Hmm. Gemini cannot do various things I used to do with assistant, especially interacting across some apps, or jsut behaving as it used to , and now sometimes ends up in a situation where I have two audio sources playing one over the other with no way to solve it (if you have morning routines that play the news, and it pops up while listening to teh radio, previously I could say 'stop the news' and the radio would continue while the alarm routine news would stop. Now there is no way at all to stop the routines triggered news, it just carries on over the top ov the radio :/by alienbaby
- Google Assistant is going away, to be replaced by - checks notes - Google Assistant by a different name.
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Tangentially related, does anyone know any FOSS (local preferred, but self hosted if required for performance) assistant apps? After switching to GrapheneOS I do miss Bixby (say what you want about it, but creating reminders/alarms by merely holding down a button and using natural speech was quite handy).
- Home Assistant [1] can be a voice assistant (both on phone and on dedicated devices). It's FOSS and can be fully local [2]. It's really gear towards home automation though, so its suitability depends on what you want to do with an assistant
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/
[2] Although frankly to have a fast-enough and good-enough LLM you might need to use a service
by advisedwang - Another name and worse experience. Bloated, heavy, slow, bad with voice commands, and overall much more annoying to work with.
One of the few things google did better than Apple was the minimal assistant. That's gone. Gemini is just worse.
by selicos