I don’t know how to say this, but sometimes the emotional labor of opening another app on my phone and typing in some text is just too much.
I need to gather details about an Airbnb reservation from two different confirmation emails and send them to my friends. Or I want to figure out when to leave this coffee shop to get home by a certain time via bus. These aren’t hard things to do, but they require enough tapping around different apps or tabbing between screens that I start to think, you know what? I don’t really need to send that email yet. I’ll just wing it and hope for the best with the bus schedule.
These are the jobs I would like AI to take from me. AI, including Google’s new Gemini assistant, isn’t quite up to it yet. But Gemini feels like a preview of what that AI future could look like — provided you’re well entrenched in Google services.
Gemini is Google’s AI chatbot, formerly known as Bard. It’s an app you download from the Google Play Store, but it really it’s a piece of the Google app that’s probably already on your phone if it runs Android. Once it’s up and running, you can replace the standard Google Assistant with Gemini and invoke it in all the same ways you would the old Assistant. But instead of just setting timers and telling you the weather, it can do all the stuff Bard did — answer complex questions, make suggestions, and read your email, if you let it.
That last part is important. Gemini isn’t nearly as good of a conversationalist as ChatGPT, but its ability to hook into Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs is what makes it really interesting.
I asked it to summarize the details of that Airbnb reservation, and it did — grabbing info from two different emails and putting it together in a neat little bullet point list. Then I asked it to draft an email to my friends with all of the details. Most of the time when I ask AI to write an email or text, the results are too embarrassing to actually send to anyone. To my great surprise, this one was fine.
It really doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the first time I’ve been really impressed with AI as a tool to help me get things done. Maybe I lack imagination, but I get bored with ChatGPT pretty quickly; there’s only so many times I can brainstorm business plans for a retro arcade or ideas for vacations. What I actually want is help with the pile of digital crap I’m constantly wading through just to live my life.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/24066399/google-gemini-voice-assistant-app-android