I can now imagine taking this approach when I want to learn about anything and continue the conversation even after Gemini responds to my initial query. I still have a lot of concerns: Why is there no direct attribution or source for the information that appears? Can I trust that everything it says is accurate? Hsaio says that when you exit Gemini Live, you can click the little “G” icon below the transcribed text to check its workings and conduct your own Google searches.
But I find myself increasingly thinking that this is the future of search. You just ask, get the answers, and keep talking to learn more. The problem is that Gemini tends to talk a lot. Its answers are verbose, so you often have to wait a while before you can continue. Yes, you can interrupt it to move on, but it’s awkward to interrupt a voice assistant. I don’t want to be rude!
Where in the world is Google Assistant?
With all this focus on Gemini and Gemini Live, you’re probably wondering: Where is the Google Assistant? If you tap on your profile icon in the Gemini app, you’ll see an option to Switch to Google Assistant If you want to go back to the old experience, it’s hard to say how long that option will be available. Currently, there are some things the Assistant can do that Gemini can’t, so there’s a handoff from one to the other. “Increasingly, Gemini will be able to perform those actions on its own,” Hsiao says.
But earlier this month, Google announced new Nest products, which also brought the news that the Google Assistant will soon have a more natural voice, and some of its features will be updated with Gemini’s great language models. You’ll be able to ask it if a FedEx delivery person showed up at your door, for example, and it will be able to analyze this from your video doorbell feed. Motion alerts could be much more descriptive rather than just saying “person detected.”
That means we now have two assistants, and it seems Google is completely fine with this for the moment. Hsiao says Gemini will be your personal assistant, who you can ask about calendar appointments and email invitations, all based on your personal data. At home, Google Assistant is your “community” assistant, because it’s more of a family device. “People don’t want their personal emails to be accessible via voice on a living room speaker where a guest can ask, ‘Hey Google, what’s in Julian’s email? ’”
It sounds like a recipe for a branding disaster. It’s already hard enough to keep track of all the Gemini variants that already exist (and don’t forget that Gemini was “Bard” when it launched in preview last year). It could also mean that certain features will be limited depending on what device you’re using, to prevent a guest from snooping through your emails. If you get into the habit of asking Gemini on your phone to take care of a task, but then leave your phone in the other room and the Assistant on your Nest speaker refuses to do it, isn’t that frustrating?
“We’re still exploring the brand and we’re still in the early stages of development,” Hsiao says. “Branding aside, we need to make sure that people get what they want from their most useful assistant, whether it’s on their personal phone or at home, and that it solves their use cases.”
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