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Comment by mianos | Hacker News Reader

I sure hope this is better than pathetically useless. I assume it is to replace the extremely frustrating Gemini for Android. If I have a bluetooth headset and I try "play music on Spotify" it fails about half the time. Even with youtube music. I could not believe it was so bad so I just sat at my desk with the helmet on and tried it over and over. It seems to recognise the speech but simply fails to do anything. Brand new Pixel 10. The old speech recognition system was way dumber but it actually worked.

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I was riding my motorcycle the other day, and asked my helmet to "call <friend>." Gemini infuriatingly replied "I cannot directly make calls for you. Is there something else I can help you with?" This absolutely used to work.

Reminds me of an anecdote where Amazon invested howevermany personlives in building AI for Alexa, only to discover that alarms, music, and weather make up the large majority of things people actually use smart speakers for. They're making these things worse at their main jobs so they can sell the sizzle of AI to investors.

Yes, I am also talking about a Cardo. If it didn't used to work near 100% of the time this time last year it might not be so incredibly annoying, but to go from working to complete crap with no choice to be able to go back to the working system is bad.

It's like google staff are saying "If it means promotion, we don't give a shit about users".

I remember trying "call <my wife's name as in my contacts>" a few years ago and Google Assistant cheerfully responding with "calling <first Google search hit with the same name>, doctor". I couldn't believe it, but back then, instead of searching my contact list, it searched the web and called the first phone number it found. A few years later (but still pre-Gemini), I tried again and it worked as expected. Now, some time ago, post-Gemini, it refused to make a call. This is basically the first most obvious kind of voice command that comes to mind when wondering what you can do with the assistant on your phone and it's still (again?) not working after years of voice assistant development. Astonishing.

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