Google Assistant is going away on Mobile Devices

I spent years not upgrading because when I'm in my car asking my phone to navigate somewhere, Gemini likes to say "As a large language model I can't navigate anywhere. Try using a map application on your mobile device."

It still does it, but these days you can reply: "yes you %@#$ing can, use a tool call!!" and it will

Google Assistant is going away, to be replaced by - checks notes - Google Assistant by a different name.

k

Tangentially related, does anyone know any FOSS (local preferred, but self hosted if required for performance) assistant apps? After switching to GrapheneOS I do miss Bixby (say what you want about it, but creating reminders/alarms by merely holding down a button and using natural speech was quite handy).

Always stuck to the flagship google models as my primary driver (starting with the G1 in college) for the pure google experience, but between killing assistant in favor of Gemini which can't do something as simple as telling me the weather without hallucinating and the sideloading lockdown shenanigans might as well switch over to Apple fully.

Hmm. Gemini cannot do various things I used to do with assistant, especially interacting across some apps, or jsut behaving as it used to , and now sometimes ends up in a situation where I have two audio sources playing one over the other with no way to solve it (if you have morning routines that play the news, and it pops up while listening to teh radio, previously I could say 'stop the news' and the radio would continue while the alarm routine news would stop. Now there is no way at all to stop the routines triggered news, it just carries on over the top ov the radio :/

I know I am in the minority, but the killer feature for me is (funny) a vestige from the Google Podcasts days: The "latest news" audio feed it plays back on a built-in player. You tell Assistant to "play the latest news". It plays a pre-selected roster.-

PS. Strangely it used to boilerplate back with "Here's [the/your] latest news" - now it says "Here's your news briefing" ...

... but it still works.-

I will miss that.-

I'm switching to Ubuntu Touch btw.

google assistant has been failing at more and more extremely simple tasks the last few months. the writing was on the wall.

Gemini let's them do monitor people, better! #BigBrotherAsService