Hacker News Reader

Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

I understand Google feels they need to compete in coding AI. The crazy thing to me is:

- Gemini can't make me a calendar appointment between myself and another person for 30 minutes in the next week. Heck it can't make appointments yet. - it can't edit or collaborate on Google docs, just insert. I edit my docs in cline or Claude code as markdown and upload. - speaking of, I don't think they have a MCP for working with docs or sheets - Gemini is worse than a Google search at helping me with sheet formulas

There's all these unique places in googles ecosystem I feel they could/should be excelling at AI at. They're not.

Hell I noticed yesterday searching for my remarkable preorder from years ago that you can't exact string search Gmail anymore. Searching for remarkable was pulling up "amazing". They're just degrading all of their products to stupidity at a time when I and AI can use more powertools

View on HN

I’ve actually been using Gemini on my phone to create appointments from details on my screen. For example, I have a delivery coming so there is an email with the date and time range. I can press and hold my power button and Gemini pops up. I press a button to use screen context. Then say, "put this in my calendar". Then it does. It isn’t perfect. Events that cross multiple days or odd location details in the description sometimes don’t get included. But that is more and more rare. I’m using an Android phone. So maybe that is why it seems to work. I do see that "mostly works" is not the same as "always works".

Also, if you are a Google Workspace customer, you can connect your workspace to the Gemini web app. It can then search and manipulate your calendar and your drive. It will also summarize documents and a few other tasks. I have less use for this but it is far from "it _can’t_ make appointments".

google workspaces gemini web app keeps saying it can't alter my calendar

gemini in calendar says it can't alter my calendar

I think Google doesn’t turn Gemini loose on docs the same reason Apple doesn’t turn AI loose on your phone. It’s just not reliable enough to let 99.99% of the world use it. Those of us on the bleeding edge have been fine tweaking and working with inconsistencies. If you put a lot of work in, you get a productivity boost. Think of the family member you are “tech support” for. (You know who you are) would you recommend that to them? Yeah. Me neither.

I get your point, it's sad. But your family memeber isn't hooking a docs MCP up to an AI and doing things. Docs also has history, I can just undo the dumb crap it would do.

In the meanwhile the rest of us are running around with a pole that has a chainsaw generator on it swinging it in every direction to solve problems. When I have these issues now I just have AI write tools to get around it. To search my email I just had ai crack my takeout files and look for the email. Was easier than figuring out the google product.

> Heck it can't make appointments yet. - it can't edit or collaborate on Google docs, just insert.

I'm sure it's capable of doing those things, but they have it turned off because of the significant risks involved in automatically editing important documents like that.

I suspect this is the case, much like with Apple Intelligence as well. Case in point, see the early Apple notification summaries of text messages. "Mom: That hike killed me!" AI Summary: "Mom died on hike."

All it needs though is a sandbox to execute the action in, and an approval flow for the user to review the changes the agent wants to make, or make revisions. Why does it have to be all or nothing? "Hey Google, schedule a meeting with x for next week when we are both available" "Google: OK, here's a preview of the calendar invite - do you want me to send it, or make changes, or cancel?"

if it's not trustworthy just fork the doc and let people try it and then copy paste back in...

instead I'm just pulling it out to other tools and using markdown import. I'm basically moving away from using google docs because of these issues.

I 100% agree with this, and there are just _so many use cases_ that are small and useful like this.

Heck, just yesterday my partner forgot the grocery list printout so I took a picture of it and asked gemini to convert it to a format where I could copy and paste it to a specific todo list app that was already shared with her. INSTEAD, Gemini dumped the list into Google Keep, albeit with terrible formatting. Didn't miss a single item, but did not recognize categories of item (produce vs frozen food, for example)

So my read on it is there's a lot of "rough around the edges" use cases which can be tidied with better prompting/context or just Gemini team prioritizing those things when they get around to it.

What they actually _need_ is a marketing team showing off useful applications of the releases more often. OpenAI is ALL OVER TIKTOK and people I meet under 30 on that platform don't even know gemini exists. In my experience, Gemini is better than chatGPT at everything you need to do, and it can do the things that the OpenAI marketing people are constantly showing off on TikTok.

Yeah, I figured I'd try Gemini for Google Docs, but given how restricted it is, why would I?

"Take each H1 heading and split that section off into a separate document tab"

A simple but tedious task that I wanted to do for a large document. Nope, Gemini says it can't do that. It offered to tell me HOW to do it though!

Is there something Gemini can actually do that's useful?

I did something similar after copy/pasting Markdown into a Google Doc, assuming Gemini could obviously convert the section headers and such…nope!

combined with separate plans to use the Gemini CLI, it’s an incredibly goofy situation

I asked Gemini to create a chart from the tabular data I had, and nope, it can't do that.

I tried Gemini for gDrive to find some files and it was useless.

I tried it in Slides to generate some slides from text, it was useless.

I tried having it produce a plot for me in Sheets and it was useless. (It does look up documentation but I could already do that.)

I haven't found any useful feature for it in Google Workplace; but I do get AI summaries of everything now, which I don't need and have to keep dismissing.

I haven't yet used it in Google Docs -- it's probably decent there for writing.

Could not agree more. Trying to use Veo3 via genai/vertexai sdks has been full of dead ends, broken specs, and confusion. Good ole curl seems to work though.

There's a need for better indexing. Seems like they switched search to pure embeddings and it doesn't work. Making performant hybrid search is hard in the sense that you cannot combine indexes. Ideally something like embedding, text match and quality vector. I had PoC that worked great when using those but making it scale is hard with reasonable latency.

If something like this exist please educate me as this would make tons of products better.

Totally agree. It’s so surprising that I spent almost an hour trying to figure out how to make Gemini collaborate with me on a Google Document as a kind of artifact. I was sure I was just holding it wrong. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a feature. Even when I gave up I was still unsure if maybe my account isn’t on the right tier or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com