Ready or not, Google’s Gemini AI wants to be your new Assistant

Google’s generative AI chatbot has been given a name change and a promotion, ready to take over from Google Assistant as the main way to interact with the company’s services. Whether most people need a creativity-focused assistant constantly at their beck and call remains up for debate.

The chatbot formerly known as Bard has been renamed Gemini, which is the same name given to the underlying Google large language model that powers it. You can talk to Gemini through a web browser, but it’s also coming soon to the Google app on iPhones.

Google says Gemini can help with everything from creating learning plans to writing text messages.

More notably, a new Gemini app for Android (which is rolling out gradually and has not hit Australia yet) provides a dedicated space for Google’s chatbot on smartphones for the first time and even allows you to use Gemini as your default voice-activated helper in place of Google Assistant.

This is all just the start of Google’s plans to put generative AI at the heart of many of its products.

An experimental version of the company’s search engine currently uses the technology to give specific answers rather than a list of web results; Gemini is being integrated into enterprise deployments of Google Cloud and Workspaces for applications such as fixing code or drafting emails; and a new tier of Google One gives consumers access to the most powerful Gemini model for $33 per month.

While that most powerful model is touted as being far more capable at reasoning and creative collaboration, the standard version you can use for free is still impressive. It can give advice, answer questions, generate images and analyse images you upload to answer questions about them. It can even check with other services like YouTube and Google Maps if it needs to. The question is, how many people will want or need to use it regularly throughout the day?

Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E, Microsoft’s Bing and many other AI features from companies including Samsung and Meta, Google’s models are evolving rapidly. Gemini is positioned as a next-generation creative helper who can reason, understand, and summarise. But in practice, all of these technological developments can feel like experiments that excel at creating surface-level illusions of human creativity – sentences that are easy to read, images that look like photos at a glance – with a litany of errors or misunderstandings under the surface.

Almost all the use cases given by Google to justify having Gemini in place of Assistant, as well as all the suggested prompts shown when you open a new chat with Gemini, are the kinds of things that demonstrate the power of large language models but aren’t actually that useful: for example, prompts such as “give me a language plan to learn Mandarin” or “generate an image in a watercolour style”. The utility for an ordinary consumer seems small compared with the size of the effort big companies are putting into promoting the technology.

There are specific situations where the technology can clearly help. I imagined I was trying to design graphics for a basketball team and asked Gemini to create some ideas featuring a wasp, and it did pretty well. It didn’t do as well when I asked for it in specific colours (it always used yellow), and I had mixed results when I asked it to add text. Common phrases such as “slam dunk” or “no way” tended to work fine, but it had a horrendous time trying to add “Melbourne Wasps”. Overall, I can see how it would be useful as a starting point.

On the other hand, I showed Gemini a picture of my cat sleeping on a crate of vinyl records and asked it to draft some social captions, which is an application companies frequently suggest as a use case. It made 10 suggestions, which were all either very generic (“just chillin’ like a villain”) or total nonsense (“the only thing softer than that fur is that crate”).

For factual content, Gemini is not yet at a place where you can take its responses at face value, and it’s certainly not alone there. As with Bing, it presents its findings confidently but always needs double-checking.

Some answers it gave to my questions were clearly wrong (it insisted that the latest science indicated the moon was older than Mars but gave a nonsensical explanation), while others seemed fine (its explanation of doorbell voltage transformers checked out). In cases where the answer was effectively “it depends”, Gemini gave long rambling non-answers with a tendency to hedge its bets.

In one case, it answered, “What is the oldest living civilisation?” with a long explanation of why that’s such a difficult question, but it did make arguments for several candidates that seemed sound. When asked, “How many Sonic the Hedgehog video games are there?” Gemini rightly explained it depended on how you interpret what a game is and how many esoteric spinoffs you consider to be part of the main series. It then gave a detailed breakdown of sub-categories and how many games are in each. It looked like it had taken the information straight from Wikipedia, except that it was all completely incorrect. The numbers were just made up.

When it comes to factual results, Gemini’s output is often automatically double-checked by a web search that happens in the background. If Google thinks it has verified the information, it highlights it in green. If it thinks the information could be wrong, it highlights it in yellow. But it rarely attributes the facts it reports to any source. In most cases, you’d be better off just searching the web in the first place and clicking a link from somewhere trustworthy.

As for Gemini’s suitability as a voice assistant, a Google support page makes it clear that the standard Assistant is still better when it comes to almost every task you might need it for, including setting reminders and timers, controlling smart home devices, sending messages, playing media and navigating using Google Maps.

Meanwhile, all of Gemini’s strengths – summarising text, generating and analysing images, creating bulleted plans – are things I can’t quite imagine needing my phone to do on demand.

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.