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Google has replaced the Google Assistant app on Android with Gemini by default

This means:

  • Downloading or updating the Assistant app now gives you Gemini instead.
  • You can switch back to Assistant in the Gemini app settings.
  • This might be Google's first step towards replacing Assistant completely with Gemini.
  • Some users are unaware of the switch and see two Gemini apps on their phones.

Overall, this may suggest Google is phasing out Assistant and transitioning users to the newer Gemini AI technology.

HKayn ,
@HKayn@dormi.zone avatar

The amount of hue shift in that phone display in the photo is hilarious.

Floshie ,

What is Gemini by default ?

Squire1039 OP ,
@Squire1039@lemm.ee avatar

The article claims that the default assistant for a new phone is Gemini, but it seems people who responded here haven't seen it. I already have the option to switch to Gemini, which I haven't.

DjMeas , (edited )

I loved being able to open up Assistant to quickly summarize an article for me, but Gemini requires me to also attach the URL to its context and then type/say "Summarize" and then hit the submit button only to wait longer for the summary.

The only pro I can think about is that I can continue to ask for details about or related to the article.

Squire1039 OP ,
@Squire1039@lemm.ee avatar

Lovely, that's a trick I haven't tried on Andorid.

chokidar ,
@chokidar@lemmy.world avatar

Your device is not your device.
Google's device, google's rules!

thecrotch ,

Nobody's violating your rights by publishing an update to the software they provide. If you don't like it android gives you an option to freeze apps at a particular version. You can let go of your pearls now.

wheeldawg ,

I'm confused. There is no assistant app as far as I can tell. It seems to just be part of the OS.

I don't see a Gemini app either though.

cosmosaucer ,

I think it's still supposed to come out in the EU, if that's where you're at, Google releases launch in the EU with a delay for likely legal reasons

Squire1039 OP ,
@Squire1039@lemm.ee avatar

Google assistant "app": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.googleassistant&hl=en&gl=US

I think once it's rolled out in your region, the assistant will pester you to switch to Gemini.

There is no Gemini app of any kind for me either.

wheeldawg ,

Interesting. I use it all the time but I don't have a separate app installed for it.

ColeSloth ,

I knew they were going to end up going full gemini, but this seems too soon to pull such shenanigans, considering it's still slow to respond, can't do several things that assistantcan do, and is 100% useless when not on data.

vox ,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

in fact it can only interact with your phone by generating google assistant commands and passing them on

Cyberflunk ,

Gemini nano is data optional accepting to Google

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

accepting?

psivchaz ,

I tried it, then uninstalled pretty quickly. If I say, "Play music" then 10% of the time it would play music, and the other 90% it would tell me it can't. Same with many other assistant commands like controlling lights.

What even is the option here? When Google got rid of adding things to lists, I started my official transition away from them by moving to Proton, self hosting more stuff, etc. But for a voice assistant it seems like open source just isn't there yet, it doesn't have the hardware, and my only remaining option is to switch to Amazon (no.) Or Apple.

fidodo ,

I'm pretty sure they fired their Google assistant team already, so that's probably part of it.

le_saucisson_masquay ,

Make yourself a favor, delete this crap and instead use a real open source (means apache2) AI that performs even better than chatgpt4 or Google ai. Get Mistral 7B.

Wizard_Pope ,
@Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world avatar

Does it work like google assistant?

GroundedGator ,

Gemini doesn't work like Google assistant.

It doesn't seem to be able to actually take actions.

Things I used to do with assistant that do not work with Gemini

  • play something
  • Play "song title"
  • Play artist

I don't know about other things like seeing timers or running routines, I shut off Gemini as soon as I realized it couldn't handle my most used requests.

vox ,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

well it IS able to call to assistant (this is the only way to interaft with the phone atm) but it seems like it reverse-hallucinates sometimes and forgets that assistant CAN in fact do these things

Wizard_Pope ,
@Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world avatar

I know gemini does not. But what I gathered was to replace assistant with Mistral. Unless I misunderstood the comment.

le_saucisson_masquay ,

No i meant instead of Google ai there are better and open source alternative. It's rare enough to have open source alternative better than a product companies invested hundreds of millions in.

Wizard_Pope ,
@Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world avatar

Well yes but the original comment states to uninstall the google stuff and get yourself open source ai. With the post itself being about assistant getting replaced I think it's not an unreasonable assumption.

brbposting ,

Good recommendation.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/45480320-50e8-40a3-ada8-fb93def253cd.jpeg

Probably won’t hit quite GPT-4 levels of performance but still good.

ColeSloth ,

Great for asking questions I'm sure. Useless for setting my alarms and reminders and placing calls or sending texts, I bet.

DeepGradientAscent ,
@DeepGradientAscent@programming.dev avatar

Make Do yourself a favor

BaardFigur ,

I'm developing a completely different application called Gemini, for work. This will cause confusion

wagoner ,

Ask Google to rename theirs.

PhilipJFryJr ,

Or just wait a few yearshttps://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/1a27e32a-e8a5-4cf1-bf49-075af5bf05b5.jpeg

then_three_more ,

And it still won't be as useful as Google Now

alansuspect ,

What if I don't use Assistant? Does it still have access to other parts of my phone?

Squire1039 OP ,
@Squire1039@lemm.ee avatar

It looks like you can switch the assistant to the old one, and then turn that one off.

But just like Microsoft, Google is going to use this technology everywhere. If in the future (or now, if it is already available to you), you use features to describe images, summarize data, create texts, you probably will be using some form of Gemini.

Aopen ,
  1. Open developer options on the phone and turn ADB to ON.
  2. Connect the PC to the phone with a cable.
  3. Open terminal.
  4. Run "adb uninstall --user 0 com.google.android.apps.googleassistant".
  5. Enjoy your private life.
JoMomma ,

Done

southsamurai ,
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works avatar

Amen!

selokichtli ,

No Profit?

whoisearth ,
@whoisearth@lemmy.ca avatar

Can't profit without AI! /s

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Also, install ADB on this "the PC"

krimson ,
@krimson@feddit.nl avatar

The AI part runs in the cloud or on the phone?

Evotech ,

Cloud. LLMs aren't there where they can be run on phones at conversational speed yet.

JackGreenEarth ,
@JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee avatar

They absolutely are if you run something like open chat 1.5B, they just want to lock people into their ecosystem.

Evotech ,

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

JackGreenEarth ,
@JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee avatar

It would still be better than the default Google assistant

darth_helmet ,

It’s about the training and tuning. If a model is very good at the few dozen things that I’m likely to want my phone to do, and able to recognize when it should ask a remote, larger model for help, that’s pretty excellent and could conceivably fit on a phone. Even better if the system uses my usage data to train the model to be better for me. For example: I ask it to build me a playlist a few times, but never ask it for recipes. Eventually this usage data retrains to better handle playlist building (probably using a RAG because of how specific the data is) and drops all the training needed for making recipes, which it can always call up the chain for.

Kbobabob ,

Weird I have an option to run on the phone. It says it's more limited but it's still an option. Samsung S24 Ultra

0x2d ,

yay, more nonsense added to stock android (degoogle now)

hornedfiend ,

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.

krimson ,
@krimson@feddit.nl avatar

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 :)

hornedfiend ,

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.

krimson ,
@krimson@feddit.nl avatar

Nice! But can you pay wirelessly with your banking app?

hornedfiend ,

I can. They have their own payment app.

Bloodyhog ,

Sorry, does it mean that you can use NFC payments with your card anywhere, as it is with G pay/wallet?

hornedfiend ,

It does. It's not without flaws,but 80% of the time it works fine (it has a bug where it loses configured card when switching between multi users - so that's painful,but it's a tinfoil level choice on my part).

Most banks provide their own payment apps to use with NFC payments,but I agree Google Pay is by far better and works perfectly out of the box.
But it's google. Next ad would be related to some of your purchase history,so your data is shamelessly farmed.

ColeSloth ,

Want a tid bit of irony? I use Google rewards that asks me little surveys based on all the Google tracking of me bullshit and you get little bits of Google play store credit in return.

I use that playstore credit to buy my Windscribe VPN service every year that's $30. So I use the money Google gives me to buy the service to hide away some of the stuff that Google wants of me.

hornedfiend ,

That's some profitable irony right there. I don't disagree with people using stuff the way the want to,but I do prefer choice. Luckily for me I live in EU ,so privacy and choice is more or less still a thing, allegedly.

If that works for you,great. It's a good tip for others as well. I do spend around 70€/2 years of PIA,but I think that's reasonable.

TurtleTourParty ,

Since GrapheneOS added eSIM support withput google I'm tempted to try to remove Play Services from my installation. How do you find out which apps require Play Services?

nolight ,

This might be what you are looking for.

soulfirethewolf ,

I can't wait for home assistant assist to be good enough to replace Gemini as a assistant. Without the need for an llm

eodur ,

I've already replaced It with Home Assistant. Wake words are still shaky, but everything else is at least as good if you're willing to configure it. At least for my use cases.

shiftymccool ,

Are you able to control phone functions with assist? I don't use it mainly because I set voice timers a lot and wasn't able to find a way to do it with assist.

eodur ,

What phone functions are you interested in? In theory if you can control it from HA you can control it from Assist. Sometimes it requires a bit more elbow grease though. I don't use timers much, so I haven't tried that. I don't see why you couldn't create a custom sentence and intent for it though.

xorollo ,

I need a degoogle wiki to all me through all the things I can do to degoogle and what conveniences I might loose and potential workarounds for them. E.g. I spent a few hours getting rid of chrome, but then found out that if I want to use maps from my home screen, I can't use the search bar and I need another button on my homescreen. Also, apparently I use the images tab on Google often, and ddg doesn't have an images filter.

So anyway, without good replacements for my typical workflow, I end up just adding inconvenience and still falling back on the old workflows when I can't figure out how to get what I need degoogled.

BearOfaTime , (edited )

Flash Lineage or DivestOS, then add non-google apps as needed.

Install GApps into a different user profile (pretty sure it's Lineage that works this way now, may be DivestOS).

OK, that's not for everyone. Start with the Universal Android Debloat Utility

It's really good at showing what you can safely disable, and is easy to re-enable stuff if you have problems. I've only ever had issues from disabling stuff listed as problematic.

I don't know of a good list like you're describing - your chrome issue was likely because you disabled the rendering engine, and not just chrome. Android needs a web rendering engine (the default is chrome), which can be replaced.

Edit: Another commenter linked to this list

ArugulaZ ,
@ArugulaZ@kbin.social avatar

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.

Tagger ,

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.

MrScottyTay ,

Google pay and google phones are failures?

Both are THE standard for their respective industries, what you on about?

darth_helmet ,

iPhones define the smartphone market, but Google makes a solid runner up

Womble ,

You know that android is more popular than iphones pretty much everywhere apart from the US right?

darth_helmet ,

Android? I think I’ve heard of it. Bunch of iPhone clones of widely varying quality. I’ve owned several of both over the years (including both original models), worked for manufacturers of both, developed software for both.. the design of the modern smartphone is based on the iPhone, which continues to be most of the best-selling smartphone models in the world. It’s great that there are options in the market, I love that. The iPhone still defines the market.

DeepGradientAscent ,
@DeepGradientAscent@programming.dev avatar

The iPhone still defines the market.

Nah. It's part of it. A big part. But the audience here is probably not really Apple's iPhone audience.

darth_helmet ,

Literally the design and user experience is based on the iPhone. People here are revisionists or just jerks.

DeepGradientAscent ,
@DeepGradientAscent@programming.dev avatar

You don't need the "literally".

And, while I'm at it, others may be revisionists, you lack nuance.

At a surface level, you're correct the Android re-design in 2008 was primarily because of the arrival of the iPhone in '07. The reason for the re-design was the inclusion of a touch-screen in Apple's hardware spec. Apple was not the first company to introduce mobile computing handsets with touch screens; that honor goes to IBM.

Android was founded in 2003, and was looking to come into the digital camera market initially, before their acquisition by Google. Then they were looking to compete against Blackberry and Windows phones. UI design experiences have been playing off each other since the beginning.

Apple doesn't solely define the market, and people who work for them wouldn't assert that. They define their niche, which is the smarter business proposition.

darth_helmet ,

Yeah I stand by “revisionists or jerks”

DeepGradientAscent ,
@DeepGradientAscent@programming.dev avatar

Cool beans, dude.

cornshark ,

I thought they just shut down Google Pay yesterday?

MrScottyTay ,

I still pay with Google pay on my phone for contactless, did it literally just now. I think they just rebranded instead. Google Wallet I think it is now

then_three_more ,

No they didn't. It's just rebranded again.

Google wallet became android pay which became Google pay which became Google wallet.

Socsa ,

9 out of 10 veterinarians recommend that you do not Google your poodle.

Chozo ,
@Chozo@kbin.social avatar

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.

jungle ,

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.

Chozo ,
@Chozo@kbin.social avatar

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.

Kbobabob ,

It didn't happen on mine either. It's just not true. Samsung S24 Ultra.

EarMaster ,

And I still try to figure out how to enable it. I just want to try it out so I can decide whether I like it or not, but so far it hasn't shown up for me...

ColeSloth ,

On my samsung N20U when I use assistant for the past week it will sometimes pop up on screen asking if I'd like to try swapping to gemini. It only stays up a few seconds before going away.

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