alt Hacker NewsSiri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?
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Its gemini so at least its smartish and has some integration with the rest of the ecosystem so it can do some assistant work as long as its read mostly, but integration with the rest of the phone is almost non existent. It also struggle in noisy environments and in mixed language situations
If they didn’t have so many limitations imposed for safety or by permissioning. Hey Google call my wife. 30 seconds later “something has gone wrong”. Or hey Google play _______ on YouTube music. “Playing something else on you tube music”. Its stupid.
No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet
It works okay. I like that it's universal (the same assistant on my phone, on my home devices, in my car, in my earbuds). I like that it does tasks right, but you have to know how to phrase them (my most common is probably "remind me to X tomorrow at X time"). Setting alarms and timers, creating calendar events, asking about the weather on a specific day or in a specific place, asking how long it'll take to walk/drive somewhere -- all good. But anything more complicated than that and you get erratic behaviour. From what I've seen with my friends interacting with Siri, I'd say they're about equal in capability.
Pretty much the same as Siri. Alexa isn't any better either.
It works pretty well for me, but doesn't do nearly what I'd expect.
EG I can talk to it like I would chatgpt and it works well. But I can't be like "hey I want to get dinner with my wife on our anniversary, please book the best available option in my city for fine dining"
It's still way better than Siri, which feels like a voice CLI to me (same as Alexa, which is very low quality IME)
Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it?
Edit: why in gods name are people downvoting me for politely asking about someone’s differing experience?
The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voice recognition, and better context awareness. However, Google is desperate to kill Google Assistant and force all Pixel users to use Gemini instead. Gemini 3 is a very good LLM, and far, far, far more versatile than Google Assistant. But Gemini won't do the simple things as reliably as the old Assistant. Setting an alarm works maybe 90% of the time with Gemini. If you asked the old Assistant "What time is it?" it would respond "It's 4:40 PM". If you ask Gemini "What time is it?" it will sometimes respond "It's 4:40 PM CDT in {your city}", but sometimes it will say "It's four four zero Pee Em in {your city}" and sometimes it will do a web search. Results are spotty in other areas like voice dialing. I've retained the old Assistant, because I want to do the basic things far more often than I want to verbally vibe code. But rumor has it Google is going to disable the old Assistant in March, forcing all users onto Gemini for voice commands. Unless Gemini gets much better at handling simple tasks by then, Pixel users will end up with a voice assistant much more frustrating than Siri.