Thank you. It does, at least as it did before Gemini. I use it mainly to set up an alarm or timer, easy questions like basic math, unit and currency conversion. For those it’s good. I don’t trust it with reminders. Some useful things it had before were removed years ago, like location based reminders and screen as an input. Still good for very quick questions like I listed so I don’t need to pick up my phone to do them. Sometimes I ask the time, that works too, thankfully. I’m glad that my non-intelligent assistant can do things a calculator, clock and calendar can do. Meanwhile AI is having trouble with all of it.

Here’s Gemini not knowing what the fuck it even is and what it can do:

Wrong on two levels: It is supposed to be a voice assistant and yes you can choose voices for it.

Failing to understand basic sentences:

I think I may have typed it just so it could understand but no help, “try voice”:

So I try voice and it fails to understand again:

Failing to parse basic syntax:

I try to ask again:

It replies in that language that of course it can! Soooo next prompt:

Failing to understand again… How does “dictate” sound like “succeed”:

Try again, it’s finally ready:

But it keeps trying to interpret what I say in English right after, and a real life Who’s on First routine ensues:

Ok… Can you interpret anything on my screen? You know Google Assistant did it for a while.

I try the “live” conversation. Which is supposed to help continue so you don’t keep repeatingly initiate prompts. Cool, but it literally cannot do anything during this mode:

still going with Live, another Who’s on First routine ensues as it thinks I’m referring to the timer I set way before:

apparently the timer doesn’t even work, still 3:59 left? maybe it was cached, so I ask again to confirm:

oh never mind. it went up.

finally a while later I encountered some sort of error message that mentioned Siri. I wish I would have screenshot it at the time but I couldn’t think of it. But I either asked whether it used Siri’s code or just why it mentioned Siri at all… something like that. I can’t tell you exactly because it’s not showing up in my history:

but I think it denied having any connection to Siri because I apparently accused it of lying. of course it can’t even parse the word “Siri’s” from context:

Sometime later I ask for default Microsoft fonts:

I promise you that this is not my accent or anything. I’ve been devouring English since I was a little kid, native English speakers are usually surprised I’m not a native speaker. It’s just so much worse at understanding words, by its own admission (one of the advantages it listed for Assistant over Gemini was voice recognition, though it claimed it was a slight advantage)

I try to correct it and say I meant “Microsoft fonts”, it interprets it—hilariously—much much worse:

I try to spell the word “font” and hope it will get it but while the spelling works, it somehow interprets “Microsoft” as “humps”???

Finally my last interaction. Basic prompt, I ask the value of $20 in my own currency. This prompt works with Assistant all the time, it knows where I am and what currency I use so this should be easy, right?

I am frustrated and say how it can’t understand what I meant. IT MISINTERPRETS THE CURRENCY I MEANT AND WAS STILL NOT HELPFUL EVEN IF THE INTERPRETATION WAS CORRECT:

lastly another unhelpful response with a fucking essay just to go back:

I manually switched back and I can at least do basic shit with Assistant.

because it said “these are just a few examples” and it said nothing of value so far, I wanted more:

I was baffled that it had no contextual clues about what I said, mind that the non-AI Assistant was usually good at this. And once again, unnecessarily verbose answer, and treating my question as a tech support problem:

Here it is telling me that I should provide context each time like a fucking idiot because that’s how intelligence works, right?

Then I pointed out this is objectively worse than Assistant and it replied with a fucking essay. Please don’t read this.

I’ll just provide TLDR- both have different strengths. Google Assistant is better at things that are useful and Gemini is better at things that don’t fucking matter at all:

I asked a couple more questions about Assistant’s advantages over Gemini. It barely understood but essentially reiterated that Assistant was just better at things that are useful. So I asked more hoping for more complex things AI could do:

The answer is no, and instead it wrote me another fucking essay that I’ll skip here, about different apps I could use for automation like IFTTT. Because that’s what I want an assistant for, to tell me go do things myself.

I still wanted to see if I could make use of things so I kept it for a while. It answered some simple questions about synonyms and meanings of words. I like this one in particular:

anyway this is basically the end of the introductory period. I’ll continue with a reply for the actual meat.

Oh boy! Finally I can share my experiences with Gemini. One day it just replaced my Google Assistant which I used on my phone to quickly search simple queries, setting timers and alarms and not much more.

One day I asked for a simple search for synonyms of “oddball”, noticed the Assistant was replaced and asked why. Proof these are my first interactions from my history:

here’s its response, with casual admission to copyright infringement highlighted by me:

and when I said I don’t care and asked about Assistant again, it of course being the genius that it is, didn’t even make a connection to the context (very conversational indeed) and acted like I was asking about what happened to Assistant like I was looking for tech support:

when I asked about the voice it failed to tell me that it had many different voices I could choose from, literally one of the most basic things it could tell me about itself:

also demonstrating how incredibly unnecessarily verbose it is about everything. Google Assistant was much more concise.

so here’s my next few questions, the responses are BS so they don’t matter:

then I asked what’s different about it and it outright lied about things it already demonstrated to be false:

Enhanced Understanding and Advanced Reasoning already proven wrong by treating my question about Assistant as a tech support question rather than a question about why it was replaced by Gemini.

Enhanced Factual Knowledge proven wrong by not even having basic knowledge about itself. Demonstrated above that I asked about the voice and all it could say was “if you don’t like it sorry” rather than tell me it already had options for different voices.

This is too long and I’m just starting. Will continue in replies…

the what store now

the fact that this is and has ever even been an issue is wild.

I don’t think even kim jong un looks as stupid as this guy on a regular basis.

FYI EEVEE now supports ray tracing so lighting can be much better than before with much less hassle. cycles is obviously better for pbr but EEVEE can easily be used for more stylized renders, and probably be preferred.

deploramobile

I’m on your side but there’s no need for that kind of language.

they’re called swasticars

there’s 0% chance he didn’t practice in front of the mirror like a fucking dork

oh yeah they’re known for vandalizing … jews? what the fuck are you sniffing right now?

I don’t think that’s the distinction.

the distinction is throwing cheese at a fucking death trap of a car is not even remotely “the same level” as advocating for the extermination of groups of people, regardless of whether those groups are based on choices or immutable characteristics. you have to be actually cartoonishly insane to even think this is even comparable to anything associated with nazis.

another distinction is that nazis do and advocate for abhorrent shit, and anything done to a nazi is therefore self defense.

I just got one too

there’s a reason why you don’t want to joke around as an authority that’s more practical than “it’s tasteless”: you simply want to make sure people take it seriously when you say things. you don’t want to declare something important and have people go “they’re fucking around again”.

it’s spelled img - ur

no, it’s spelled imgur. I know what img stands for which is why I said it would be one thing to call it imgr. the u doesn’t make sense and it hardens the g. it’s funny that you talk about how it’s customary that img stands for image but you act like ‘ur’ is also a thing by itself.

well it is, just not in that way. if your img-ur breakup made any sense for pronouncing img as if it’s independent then why not consider what ur stands for? it’s a shortening of your or you’re. so why not pronounce it image your? because it’s bullshit and the spelling is ridiculous.

as it’s spelled: im gur.

It’s one thing to name it imgr, but putting a fucking u after the g makes it a hard g in literally every instance. the letter u is the reason the g is pronounced as a hard g in words that otherwise wouldn’t need a u: fragile / guile, digest / guest, etc.

I laughed out loud when I first learned that imgur is supposed to be pronounced as "imager’… well you fuckin chose the wrong combination of letters for that didn’t ya

i pronounce “gay” as “jay-why” because of the bloody alphabet

does this affect forks?